Offshore outsourcing- the movement of jobs to lower-wage countries- is
one of the defining features of globalization. Routine blue-collar
work has been going offshore for decades, but the digital revolution
beginning in the 1990s extended this process to many parts of the
service economy too. Politically controversial from the beginning,
"offshoring" is conventionally seen as a threat to jobs, wages, and
economic security in higher-income countries, having become synonymous
with the dirty work of globalization. Even though the majority of
corporations make some use of offshore outsourcing, fearful of
negative publicity most now choose to manage these activities in a
discreet manner. Partly as a result, the global sourcing business,
reckoned to be worth more than $120 billion, largely operates under
the radar, its ocean-spanning activities in low-cost labour arbitrage
being poorly documented and poorly understood. Offshore is the first
sustained investigation of the workings of the global sourcing
industry, its business practices, its market dynamics, its
technologies, and its politics. The book traces the complex
transformation of the worlds of global sourcing, from its origins in
the new international division of labour in the 1970s, through the
rapid growth of back-office economies in India and the Philippines
since the 1990s, to the development of "nearshore" markets in Latin
America and Eastern Europe. Recently, this evolving process of
geographical and organizational restructuring has included experiments
in "backshoring" within low-cost, ex-urban locations in the United
States and a wave of software-enabled automation, which threatens to
remove labour from many back offices altogether. In these and other
ways, the offshore revolution continues.
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Exploring the Worlds of Global Outsourcing
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780192517876
Publisert
2020
Utgiver
Oxford University Press Academic UK
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter