نوع شناسی برون سپاری خارجی و برون سپاری در خدمات انتقالی الکترونیکی

The offshoring and outsourcing of service work from high-wage to low-wage countries has received considerable exposure in the popular press. Some have claimed that virtually all services that can be electronically transmitted should be offshored due to the extreme labor rate differentials. Relatively little work has actually been offshored to date, making empirical assessment difficult. Here, a normative model of the appropriate role of offshoring is proposed. We present a strategic contingency model, to be viewed at the process level, intimating that firms with the same processes should come to different solutions regarding these decisions.

Although forecasts indicate a robust and significant market for services offshoring in the future, very little offshoring of these processes has actually occurred at present. It is estimated that less than 2% of call center work worldwide is performed offshore (Oates, 2005). McKinsey Global Institute (2003) estimated that total world-wide services offshoring amounts to US$ 30–35 billion for the U.S., with Ireland and India the two leading countries to offshore to, and Forrester Research has estimated that 400,000 U.S. jobs have been lost to offshoring (Vina and Mudd, 2003). While this is not a small amount, it represents far less than 1% of the service economy in the U.S. Put in a different context, the entirety of offshored U.S. jobs is less than half the workforce of WalMart. In this way services are dramatically different than manufacturing, where a large percentage of the manufactured goods consumed in the U.S. are made offshore. Since we use the term “supplier” rather than “outsourcer” for manufacturing inputs, comparable data cannot be found, but the value of products consumed in high-wage countries that were once manufactured in high-wage countries that are now manufactured in low-wage countries (a traditional definition of offshoring) is vast. This paucity of actual international service operations practice is reflected in the paucity of international service operations research. A literature review of “international operations strategy” articles (Prasad et al., 2001) found 92 such articles in 31 selected journals from 1986 to 1997. The word “services” was mentioned in the article only once. None of the 92 articles listed focused on services and only one of the articles listed appeared to have services content. In a highly similar study, Prasad and Babbar (2000) reviewed 548 “international operations management” articles in 28 selected journals published from 1986 to 1997. The authors note that “few articles on international services appeared in the set of journals reviewed” (p. 229). The main topic of “service” was listed for only 14 of the 548 articles, with several of those being the service aspects of manufacturing firms.

Electronically transmitted services offshoring, while still small, has received enormous attention. This attention derives from labor rate differentials and the range of services moving offshore. White-collar, professional work, thought by workers in developed countries to be their exclusive domain, is now being offshored to less-developed nations. And those offshore workers have salaries as little as one-tenth of the workers they are replacing. A prevailing feeling among many is that no job is safe. However, there are many risks and downsides to offshoring. The loss of local and tacit knowledge, the cultural conflict, and the additional country risk associated with offshoring argue that many information-oriented jobs will remain onshore. We presented here a typology to apply to such processes. This typology implies that while offshoring is a viable option for many firms, a proportion of the service processes now being offshored will remain in high-wage countries.