outsourcing technology labor
for a list of resources on this topic, see the technology policy bibliography
by Eugene Yarovoi
I. The issue and its social significance
Outsourcing is the practice of contracting independent parties to execute a task another party would like performed[1,2]. This definition is as broad as it seems, and as such almost every company outsources in some way or another[1], as almost every company relies on external services of some sort. Technically speaking, a company ordering catering services for its employees is outsourcing the task of having the food produced and delivered - and the provider of this service likely also outsources the task of producing and delivering the requisite ingredients to multiple other companies. Other examples include a company outsourcing payroll and janitorial tasks to two separate companies, each specializing in each of these things respectively. In essence, to outsource is to make use of inter-company labor specialization. The term usually refers to contracting other parties to perform services; however, the line between goods and services is often blurred, as with the catering example.
Outsourcing is a topic misunderstood almost as much as it is discussed. More often than not, one hears about it in a popular culture context. We hear a lot about it in the news and media.[3] One may be familiar with the typical rhetoric: "company so-and-so outsourced X number of jobs to China, resulting in less and less jobs for us, hard-working Americans" (examples: [4,5]). This view, sometimes corroborated by citizens and companies trying to polarize public opinion[6], is inaccurate on several points. First of all, not every job that is outsourced is outsourced to China or another country where labor is many times cheaper than within the United States.[7, 8] A considerable amount of outsourcing from company to company occurs within the same country[9], and often to a geographically proximate area, mainly to improve communication. The term "offshoring" more specifically describes outsourcing that involves sending labor abroad[10, 11]. Secondly, even when companies do in fact offshore, the loss of jobs within the country is not the only effect, as will be discussed later, and the benefits may easily outweigh the costs.
This article discusses the outsourcing of technology labor in particular. However, it will first be helpful to discuss the reasons for outsourcing in general, and then it will become interesting to see how those reasons carry over to the outsourcing of technology labor specifically. In addition, considerable non-economic issues are also introduced, as privacy issues often arise from the outsourcing of IT work.
To understand the origins of outsourcing and the reasons for which companies choose to outsource, a bit of history is helpful. As was mentioned earlier, outsourcing is nothing more than inter-company labor specialization. As such, it has existed as long as labor specialization has.[1] Even still, "outsourcing was not formally identified as a business strategy until 1989 (Mullin, 1996). "[12] Earlier in the 20th century, the typical business strategy was to attempt to control as many factors of production as possible[12]. The term "vertical integration" refers to the then-trend of attempting to control the entire supply chain , presumably with the goal of saving money by owning the supplier instead of buying from the supplier.[13] Outsourcing, on the other hand, can be seen as the exact counter-trend: vertical de-integration.[13] Serious outsourcing began only in the 1990s, as companies attempted to cut costs by outsourcing the processes that every company needed but did not benefit from providing itself.[12]
As a business strategy, outsourcing is sometimes defined as "the strategic use of outside resources to perform activities traditionally handled by internal staff and resources."[14] If the strategy is implemented successfully, it can result in much lower costs for the business.[1, 12, 15, 16] Companies and sometimes individuals[17] also outsource in the hopes of saving time, as a company may not possess the resources to complete a project it needs completed in a short span of time, nor the human resources to recruit such other human resources.[1] For an individual, outsourcing may become necessary as there exists a fundamental theoretical limit on how much time an individual may have, and for an individual with many responsibilities, this upper bound may be too limiting.
In the fifteen-or-so years since outsourcing became a buzzword, the practice has become very popular[18], mainly because of the possibility of greatly reducing costs for the business. It has been used by both large corporations[19, 20, 21] and individuals[17], and every size of business in between. Outsourcing is successful at reducing costs for the same reason that any kind of labor specialization is successful at reducing costs: it allows for certain companies to become very experienced at providing a given service, and "the division of a complex job into many simpler tasks [enables] each worker to master individual tasks to a degree that was impossible when he or she was responsible for the entirety of the more complex job."[22] If each worker paid for specializes in what he or she is doing, one may hope that maximum productivity will be achieved, and the price to achieve the same results as before will be lower. In addition, labor is often offshored from countries like the United States to countries where labor is much less expensive.
The degree to which outsourcing is discussed in present times (see bibliography) and certain well-known success stories lead to to the common perception that outsourcing is a road to El Dorado. It should be noted, however, that whether or not a company does in fact manage to cut costs by means of outsourcing depends a great deal on how well the company can manage the companies it contracts with.[23, 12] Many companies that choose to outsource are then disappointed with the results.[24]
Of course, to ensure its future success, a company must be careful to choose what it outsources wisely and only outsource functions that are not too closely related to the industry in which the company is trying to compete, or the well of knowledge and competence might run dry within the company. For example, Google, whose main product is computer software, is interested in maintaining a talented pool of researchers, system administrators, and software engineers[25], so that their abilities may grow and progress throughout their careers at Google. It may not be beneficial to outsource these positions even if it would mean lower labor costs, as the people who currently fill the positions are far more skilled than those that would fill the positions if they were to be outsourced, those same people might then be hired by a rival company, and because Google would then have precious few trusted engineers on board to competently decide how to execute new software projects.
On the other hand, certain other functions are ideal candidates for outsourcing. A software company, to use the previous example, requires janitors so long as it has facilities. However, it might have nothing to gain from hiring its own janitors, as janitors add nothing to the software company's expertise and abilities in its field. Furthermore, janitors are not highly skilled workers, and as such, are easily replaced, making them not very valuable as a human resource. Many information technology positions are also good candidates for outsourcing[14], as software can be developed in a very modular fashion[26]. As such, information technology outsourcing is a very common form of outsourcing[1]. It is also the primary form of outsourcing we will be concerned with in this article. Information technology outsourcing is growing at an amazing rate, as shown by predictions and observations, securing its place as an important issue. Although exact figures are hard to come by, one estimate is that a broad class of IT service outsourcing increased 59% between 2002 and 2003 in India.[27] In 2007, some predicted that offshore spending in general would increase by 40% in 2008.[28]
Outsourcing technology labor poses unique challenges to any company attempting to engage in the act. Technology labor is any sort of technology-related service, whether it be full-scale software development, software development in partnership with first company, or services like help desk, information security, and data backup.[14] For purposes of analysis, it shall be convenient to look at these classes of technology labor separately. In particular, the outsourcing of services like data backup creates interesting legal and policy issues with respect to data privacy. With regards to information security, there is often the perceived distrust of seemingly anonymous workers sitting in another country, typing one's credit card information into a terminal.[29] Perhaps it does not help that these workers are subjected to all the more temptation, given that the currency they are working with is ten times more valuable than their own. Services like help desk pose more practical issues - what if the workers in India are not as proficient in English as the contractor claims they are? This could result in a loss of customers. For software development, there is the obvious problem of communication, and the different time zones often make it so that communication is possible only though e-mail, rendering communication between programmers and managers slow and ineffective.[23] As one article puts it, "producing high-quality software on time and within budget is hard enough when the [quality assurance] team is across the aisle from the core developers, and the customers across the street; what then when the bulk of the development team is across an ocean or two?"[30]
Aside from the challenges described already, is the ever-ongoing debate on whether the outsourcing of information technology (IT) jobs to India and Bangladesh, among other places, is harming the American economy and taking jobs from Americans. Information technology jobs are often offshored because, perhaps for certain tasks more than others, the most important costs of information technology may be labor costs. So, it is beneficial to have these functions performed in another country where the hourly wage rate for IT services is lower. For example, in India, this rate ranged from $4 to $10 per hour as of 2005-2007 [16, 17], compared to anywhere between $30 to $100 in the United States around the same time.[7] As such, offshoring is truly tempting for companies needing IT services; however, some feel that the potential savings come at the expense of great harm to the economy.
II. The conflicting positions
To begin, imagine the following situation: a worker has worked for many years for a company in the IT department. Now, the company decides to offshore IT operations, leaving the worker unemployed. Furthermore, the decision to offshore greatly cuts costs, and, to remain competitive, other companies follow in this lead (a vicious cycle). As a result, perhaps none of the local companies offer IT positions any longer, and the worker is unable to find any sort of suitable employment. This type of situation has been the subject of much hype and the source of much of the popular culture representation of outsourcing (see [3], for instance).
The debate over whether foreigners are "stealing" jobs from citizens of a country is not a new debate, but an old one in so many places. Even in the United States, there is the debate over illegal immigrants arriving mainly from Mexico.[31] Germany has a related situation with immigrants arriving from a variety of places, perhaps most notably Turkey.[32] In both of these countries, a significant number of people complain of legal or illegal immigrants flooding the country and taking jobs from citizens, mainly because they are willing work for a much lower wage than citizens are.[31, 32] The somewhat unusual characteristic to the debate on outsourcing technology labor in particular is that jobs are being taken away from the nationals of a country by skilled laborers, and that the skilled laborers do not reside in the country from where they are supposedly "stealing" jobs.
Both these characteristics result in the debate over information technology outsourcing being somewhat unique. First, because workers are losing skilled positions, unemployment may not be the only statistic relevant to gage the loss of jobs within the United States. For example, it could be that the previously skilled workers are simply downgrading to unskilled or less skilled positions, and such undesirable consequences should be considered as well. Furthermore, it becomes far less obvious that such outsourcing is beneficial to maintaining a wealthy nation. In the case of unskilled jobs being outsourced, one could have argued that few people in first-world countries want to perform these jobs in any event. However, now we face the possibility that many people who are passionate about what they do, say software developers, might find themselves losing their jobs regardless of this quality. Naturally, this also increases the public sentiment against outsourcing. Secondly, in the debate on offshore outsourcing, unlike in the debate surrounding illegal immigrants, the United States (for example) could simply choose to pass effective legislation completely banning the practice. If it does not do so, it is a voluntary decision and not one constrained by infrastructure (e.g. the difficulty of immediately locating and seizing all illegal immigrants or effectively insuring that they are not employed "under the table").
It is important to realize just how old the debate on foreigners versus the national economy is. Historically, centuries ago, it would have been somewhat difficult for a company located in one country to directly commission services from another country. It happened; however, it was not an everyday phenomenon for most businesses. Goods, on the other hand, were routinely imported from other countries.[33] To somewhat shield the national economy, governments would impose protective tariffs, a tax on goods intended to artificially increase the price of a good coming from abroad[34], with the goal of helping domestic products compete in an otherwise free market.[35] So, several centuries ago, one might not have talked about increasing the price of foreign labor, but the price of foreign goods, foreign goods being a direct product of foreign labor. One can see how the difference is very slight. The same debates would then occur: are foreigners effectively putting citizens out of work because foreign goods are cheaper, and no tariff is protecting the domestic industry? If there is a tariff, is it too high? Is it hurting free trade? Should free trade be allowed no matter what short-term effects it seems to be having on the national economy? How about restricting free trade temporarily to allow a developing industry to fully form before it has to fend for itself in an international economy?[35]
We might now rightly ask the question of whether outsourcing, in general, in the long run, and in purely economic terms, is beneficial. At this point, having shown the parallels between goods and services, between free outsourcing (outsourcing with no tariffs) and free trade, and knowing from classical economics that free trade is beneficial to the parties involved[36], it is easy to see that classical economic theory indicates that outsourcing is beneficial in the long run, if nothing but economic effects are considered. If outsourcing was to be disallowed, or protective tariffs were to be implemented, the competition to provide the service would be imperfect on a global scale. Proponents of outsourcing also argue that outsourcing will create new higher-skilled jobs in time, as the companies that are cutting costs by outsourcing will now have more money to spend.[37, 38] Some of this money, proponents argue, will go towards hiring new employees that will presumably handle tasks that require too much skill or responsibility to be outsourced.[37,38] Opponents argue that these jobs too will be outsourced in good time[40], effectively constantly forcing the unemployment rate to be higher than it would otherwise be, and that it may not be easy for those left unemployed to retrain themselves to qualify for the new higher-skilled positions.[40]
However, there is some merit to the claims that outsourcing takes away, at least in the short run, jobs from citizens. Consider the following extreme scenario: a person is working an IT position for a company. Suddenly, the country where this is happening lifts an economic sanction prohibiting any kind of commercial interaction with a second country. Suppose that the cost of the same IT services in the second country is almost zero, and the number and skill level of prospective candidates is almost infinite compared to the respective statistics in the first country. Naturally, the company outsources the position, and the worker in the first country is left without a job. Furthermore, other software companies may notice that X is greatly reducing its costs by outsourcing, and outsource their IT departments, creating a veritable chain reaction, as described by critics of outsourcing. Since the second country has a tremendous supply of laborers willing to work at the lower wage, it is able to fill all positions all companies would like to outsource. This inundation of supply may effectively drive the aforementioned IT worker out of the entire industry. If IT services is the only area in which this worker is educated, he or she, as well as all other IT workers in the first country, might be forced into prolonged unemployment. As proof to further the evidence supplied by this thought experiment, Hewlett-Packard is an example of a real-world company known to have offshored jobs with the purpose of cutting costs.[19] One can easily see that it is thus possible for a great number of people to be forced into unemployment by other, competing offshore workers. The earlier analysis under classical economic theory did not directly take into account that time, and possibly a considerable amount thereof[40], could be required before a worker previously producing one good or service can learn to produce another.
However, economic effects are not the only forces that enter into the equation. In the United States, there is what is probably a minority, but a vocal one, of those who believe that it is in some sense immoral to allow American jobs to be sent abroad. Several websites[4, 29] and blogs[41] are at least a little suggestive of this idea. It should be noted that these are not necessarily very educated opinions on the issue, given the obvious rhetoric on the websites and the sometimes poor grammar used by the bloggers. On the other side of the moral argument, some question whether it is moral to remove the possibility of better pricing for companies, and eventually the creation of better, higher-skilled jobs for citizens, simply because of a resulting slightly higher unemployment rate. Jordan made the same moral argument for free trade in 1908, commenting that "at the bottom of every argument [for the restriction of free trade] remains the necessary recognition of its primal iniquity"[35]. Some choose a more intermediate stance and say that outsourcing is immoral if it ignores the community out of greed for more profits, but may be moral if the profits are used for something worthwhile: to fund scholarships and aid disadvantaged groups, for instance.[43]
Outsourcing has helped build up the economies of developing nations as well, another economic and moral argument in favor of outsourcing. In theoretical economics terms, when companies in one country pay workers in a second country, the companies need to purchase the currency of the second country to make the payment (or the companies pay in the currency of the first country that the workers then exchange). This would increase demand for the second country's currency, changing the exchange rate to be more favorable for the second country.[36] If this were the only sector in both countries' economies, the currency of the second country would appreciate until companies in the first country would no longer have any monetary incentive to outsource. In India, although IT services may be but a small portion of the Indian GDP, the industry is quickly growing, and outsourcing has already had a profound effect on "local economies with high IT concentration" [44].
In addition, in the United States at least, there is the desire to keep the nation fairly self-sufficient[45] because of the possibility of war or crisis in the future. Outsourcing and free trade in general tend to reduce the extent to which nations are self-sufficient[45]. If most U.S. companies outsource most of their IT departments to, for instance, India, then if ever there is a crisis in India and Indian workers are no longer able to provide the services, there will likely be a significant shortage of IT workers within the U.S. This could temporarily cripple the country while more people are educated to provide IT services. In addition, the United States government obviously has considerably less control over whether or not crises occur in foreign countries than it has influence on policy within the country. The rationale may be that the government can stop outsourcing now, but if not stopped, it may be too late to reverse the effects of outsourcing later. On the other hand, even information technology jobs are not all outsourced to India, or any other single country. Work might be outsourced, for example, to Bangladesh [17, 46], the Philippines [47, 48], South Korea [49], or to other places within the United States.[5,7] Self-sufficiency becomes less of a concern given these circumstances, and remains any real concern at all solely in the event of a global crisis. However, some IT work must still be done domestically for security reasons, such as secret work for the government or military. It should be noted, however, that the U.S. military does make heavy use of outsourcing for its less critical tasks.[50] There is increased pressure to do more of this defense work in the United States.[50]
III. Relevant Research
There has been much research on outsourcing, as well as many recent books written for the layperson mentioning the topic[15, 16]. The topic is also often mentioned in magazines [5, 7, 17], business articles, etc. Some of the main points of focus range from research on how to outsource more efficiently[23], to determining which of the companies that outsource actually benefit from outsourcing[24], to evaluations of outsourcing on the economies of various countries. There is less continued academic debate on whether outsourcing is beneficial to the economy of a country, as most simply agree on the view that it is an inevitable trend caused by the forces of the free market (which we all love and cherish). Many attempts at outsourcing work result in disappointment, as the expected costs are often underestimated[24], but that is a practical issue affecting mostly companies new to the outsourcing model, and as outsourcing becomes more and more common, this problem will arguably depreciate in importance.
IV. Outsourcing and Privacy
Another interesting aspect of outsourcing is the privacy-related issues, as these are the primary legal issues associated with outsourcing. "Although an organization may outsource some of its business processes, and with it part of its responsibility for privacy, the organization cannot outsource its accountability for privacy" [45]. In other words, an organization outsourcing a process involving personal data to a second entity could still be held liable for data breaches if the organization has entered into a privacy agreement with customers. In theory, it should then be able to pass on the responsibility to its breaching partner; however, this could be hard to achieve in a country whose legal system is not sufficiently developed to allow effective legal means to force the breaching party to comply with privacy laws or to pay damages.[51] As much IT work is outsourced to countries that are or are often perceived as third-world countries [17, 46, 47, 48], privacy concerns become very important in the decision to outsource.
"U.S. and European companies are concerned about a weak legislative environment and difficulties related to contract and privacy enforcements in India,"[51] and this has caused some companies not to offshore despite potential savings of as much as 50% (although it was not IT services that were in question here) [51]. Certain countries, most notably the E.U., have in place directives that disallow the transfer of personal data outside the country (or the E.U., as the case may be) unless the destination country provides a high standard of security for private data [51]. U.S. standards of data security have often been considered lax by the E.U [52]. This could make it difficult, for instance, for a company in the E.U. to outsource its IT department to a U.S.-based company, if the U.S. company would need to manage sensitive employee records as part of its day-to-day operations.
The difficulty with privacy also arises from the fact that different countries have different privacy laws and use different methodologies to protect the privacy of consumers, requiring companies looking to outsource tasks involving sensitive data to possess considerable knowledge of the regulations of various countries. In the United States, the laws lean towards allowing businesses to choose how they protect the privacy of consumers, in an attempt to use the invisible hand of the free market to guide businesses to providing better data security for their customers [51]. In the European Union, on the other hand, legislation has been a dominant force in deciding privacy standards [51]. It is partly because of this difference in philosophies that the E.U. has considerably stricter privacy regulations.
Lastly, a company may choose not to outsource anything involving the handling of personal data simply because - despite what may be promised by a contractor - it is difficult to know exactly to what extent personal information is being protected. If a company does not outsource, there is almost no limit as to how carefully the company might guard private information; if the company does outsource, that decision is thrust into the hands of the contractor. The possibility of a privacy violation is increased in some foreign countries where it is costly to conduct criminal background checks, as the country lacks standard identifiers similar to the U.S. social security number [51], so one might never know exactly who is working for a company offshore. Even if a suit against a contractor who violates privacy agreements is likely to be successful, there is the strong possibility that the full extent of the damage, including the possibly significant loss of reputation for the company that finds itself in violation of privacy agreements with its customers, will never be paid for. Consumers value their privacy, and often do not take kindly to violations of it. Furthermore, a portion of the money that is needed to compensate the company suffering from the breach by the contractor will likely be consumed by legal fees and hassle in general - the transaction costs of the legal system. It is reasonable to believe that many companies may find it more attractive to simply not open such possibilities by not outsourcing tasks involving private customer data.
On the other side of the argument, it would be unfair to say that offshore firms in India, Bangladesh, and other outsourcing hubs are necessarily careless in their handling of sensitive data. Aware of the issue, some firms of IT workers in India, among other places, attempt to make people confident in the safety of their private data by disclosing what (sometimes meticulous) practices are used to protect data, and putting a clearly marked privacy section on their website [53]. On many other websites, on the other hand, there is no such clearly visible information on privacy policies [54, 55]. However, some sources say that one's privacy may be better protected abroad than in one's own hands, as contractors will often go to great lengths to restrict employee access to sensitive data such as credit card information and allow only certain "trusted" workers to key in that information [16].
V. Legislation
"As of the mid-2004, there were 186 bills pending in the U.S. Congress and 40 state legislatures that aimed to limit offshore outsourcing (Engardio et al. 2004, Solomon 2004)" [51]. To reiterate the obvious, this is a tremendous number of bills. In 2006, there was a massive amount of legislation regarding outsourcing being considered [56]. The legislation ranges in scope from reporting requirements for outsourcing in certain state functions to more wide-reaching legislation such as prohibiting a corporation from outsourcing without the consent of the board of directors [56]. In the United States at least, politicians tout the loss of jobs that outsourcing causes, and must respond to very vocal critics of the practice that help create the inaccurate, popular-culture image of outsourcing. Some charge that the foreigners that are "stealing" American jobs are used as scapegoats for general discontent about unemployment [6], only a part of which is caused by offshoring practices. It has been suggested that politicians exploit the popular fears of losing one's job to a foreigner for political advantage during an election [6]. "Anecdotes of workers affected by outsourcing are politically powerful, and demands for government protection always increase during economic slowdowns."[6]
There have been several highly referenced cases in which there was an egregious breach of an outsourcing contract abroad, and these cases have helped motivate legislation regarding offshore outsourcing. These "include the 2001 arrest of Shekhar Verma, a former employee of Geometric Software Solutions, an Indian company that was doing outsource de-bugging work for a software company, SolidWorks 2001 Plus. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Indian authorities arrested Verma after he allegedly tried to sell SolidWorks source code to its competitors for $200,000" [57]. In another incident, a woman hired to transcribe medical records attempted to extort money from the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, threatening to post the medical records on the Internet if a specified sum was not paid [57, 58]. In the aftermath, California politicians introduced three bills aimed to prohibit work involving medical records from being offshored [57]. In another case, the private data of 108,000 workers was leaked by a firm in India [59]. Aside from legislation absolutely prohibiting certain actions, there is also legislation aimed at giving companies incentives not to offshore, or penalizing companies that do. For instance, in the past, the Senate has approved by a wide margin (70-26) legislation sponsored by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) that would deny certain companies that offshore the possibility of receiving federal grants and loans. Curiously, the argument made against outsourcing then was rather similar to that made by (arguably uneducated) bloggers complaining about the issue.
Some legislation supports outsourcing, in a way, instead of attempting to restrict it. In the United States, the H-1 visa is an non-immigrant visa under which companies can bring foreign workers into the country with the purpose of employing them[39]. Although this may displace American jobs, this helps companies employ the skills of foreign workers and encourages these highly sought individuals to become permanent residents and then citizens, helping bring talent into the country and perhaps reducing offshoring in the long run. Even for IT work, companies might prefer to bring workers into the country to improve team communication.[27]
Ultimately, however, there is no comprehensive legislation regulating outsourcing. "The States have been far more aggressive than the federal government in addressing the issue of outsourcing" [42], and most legislation takes the form of state statutes standing separately, with no coherent unifying principles. One of the few common themes has been to restrict the award of state contracts to U.S. contractors [42]. When not overruled on one point or another by a federal or state statute, contract law (and thus caselaw) naturally governs the agreement between the two parties. Thus, unless specifically prohibited by a state or federal statute, one may contract to outsource any service allowable by contract law. The caselaw formed regarding outsourcing, then, is more like caselaw regarding contracts in general.
VI. Conclusion
Outsourcing, specifically offshore outsourcing of technology labor, presents companies with unique challenges, and in some circumstances, should companies meet these challenges, great rewards, mostly in the form of monetary savings. Given the very rapid growth of outsourcing in recent years, workers in certain industries have found themselves out of a job, causing many complaints and many responsive attempts at legislation to restrict the practice, particularly at the state level. Privacy concerns, particularly the difficulty of enforcing privacy contracts in countries with weak legal systems, along with some highly publicized privacy breaches, have helped push forward some of this legislation. Economic theory predicts that in the long run, outsourcing will create better, higher-skilled jobs for the citizens of countries engaged in offshoring. It should benefit both countries that offshore and the countries to which labor is offshored. However, while we wait for these long term effects, a few particularly hard-hit sectors such as IT services will see general job insecurity and some degree of unemployment. Whether or not one believes these short-term harms are worth the long-term benefits, one thing is clear: the debate on outsourcing will continue for a long time.
Outsourcing Technology Labor Bibliography
I. Books
[15] Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (2005).
[16] Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek (2007).
[33] Watson, Peter. Ideas : A History of Thought and Invention from Fire to Freud (2005)
[36] David C. Colander, Microeconomics (2004)
II. Journal Articles
[22] Akihiko Matsui and Andrew Postlewaite, Specialization of Labor and the Distribution of Income, Games and Economic Behavior 33 (2000), available at http://www.ssc.upenn.edu/~apostlew/paper/pdf/specialization.pdf
[23] Henrik Munkebo Christiansen, Meeting the Challenge of Communication in Offshore Software Development, First International Conference, SEAFOOD 2007 (2007)
[30] Mathai Joseph and Bertrand Meyer, Preface, Software Engineering Approaches for Offshore and Outsourced Development, First International Conference, SEAFOOD 2007 (2007)
[51] Nir Kshetri, Institutional Factors Affecting Offshore Business Process and Information Technology Outsourcing, 13 Journal of International Management 1 (2007), available at Social Science Research Network, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=969778
III. Periodicals and Websites
[1] Outsourcing - What is Outsourcing?, available at SourcingMag.com, http://www.sourcingmag.com/content/what_is_outsourcing.asp
[2] Terms and Definitons, available at Venture Outsource, http://www.ventureoutsource.com/node/18/print
[3] Big Box Mart (cartoon), available at JibJab, http://www.jibjab.com/originals/big_box_mart
[4] Outsource Outrage, http://www.outsourceoutrage.com/
[5] Marilyn Gardner, One man's crusade against outsourcing American jobs, available at The Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0420/p03s01-usec.html
[6] Daniel W. Drezner, The Outsourcing Bogeyman, available at Foreign Affairs, http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20040501faessay83301-p0/daniel-w-drezner/the-outsourcing-bogeyman.html,
[7] Emma Johnson, Outsourcing to the Heartland, available at Wired, http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2005/11/69585
[8] Howard Berkes, Outsourcing High-Tech Jobs to Rural America, available at National Public Radio, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4496502
[9] Duff McDonald, The Call Center Next Door, available at Condé Nast Portfolio Magazine, http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2007/09/27/Outsourcing-Within-the-United-States
[10] Offshoring, available at Word Web Online, http://www.wordwebonline.com/en/OFFSHORING
[11] Offshoring, available at BNET, http://dictionary.bnet.com/definition/Offshoring.html
[12] Rob Handfield , A Brief History of Outsourcing, available at Supply Chain Management, http://scm.ncsu.edu/public/facts/facs060531.html
[13] Richard Posner, Outsourcing and the International Market in Highly Skilled Workers, available at the Becker-Posner Blog, http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2007/07/outsourcing_and.html
[14] Current Trends in Production Labor Sourcing, available at Supply Chain Management, http://scm.ncsu.edu/public/labor/index.html
[17] A.J. Jacobs, My Outsourced Life, available at SmartMoney Magazine, http://www.smartmoney.com/esquire/index.cfm?Story=20050909-outsource
[18] List of countries engaged in "exporting America", available at CNN, http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/lou.dobbs.tonight/popups/exporting.america/content.html
[19] Dan Ilett, HP Axes 100 Jobs in Outsourcing Move, available at Silicon.com, http://management.silicon.com/itpro/0,39024675,39130434,00.htm?r=1
[20] John Leyden, Microsoft outsources some DNS servers to Linux, available at The Register, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/01/29/microsoft_outsources_some_dns_servers/
[21] Chris Kohler, Microsoft Outsources New Halo 2 Maps, available at Wired, http://blog.wired.com/games/2007/03/microsoft_outso.html
[24] Outsourcing Falling From Favor With World's Largest Organizations, Deloitte Consulting Study Reveals: Hidden costs, added complexity have prompted 25 percent of participants to reduce outsourcing activities, available at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/press_release/0,1014,sid%253D1018%2526cid%253D80537,00.html
[25] Google Jobs, http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/
[26] Eric Steven Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, available at Eric S. Raymond's Home Page, http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
[27] Mary Hayes Weier, India Outsourcing Growth At Risk From Labor Backlash, available at InformationWeek,
http://www.informationweek.com/news/services/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=S3GA4G4GH311OQSNDLOSKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=10700631&_requestid=222321
[28] Linda Tucci, Gartner: Strong growth for offshoring predicted for 2008, available at SearchCIO.com, http://searchcio.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid182_gci1286775,00.html
[29] NoJobsForIndia.com, http://www.nojobsforindia.com/
[31] Shailagh Murray, Conservatives Split in Debate over Curbing Illegal Immigration, available at The Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64179-2005Mar24.html
[32] Patrick Welter, Immigrants Don't Steal the Jobs of Germans, available at Yale Global Online, http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=4079
[34] Protective Tariff, available at Merriam-Webster Dictionary, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/protective%20tariff
[35] David Starr Jordan, The Moral Aspect of the Protective Tariff, available at The Foundation for Economic Education, http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=2416
[37] Jane Sasseen, Economists Rethink Free Trade, available at BusinessWeek, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_06/b4070032762393.htm
[38]Remarks by Vice Chairman Roger W. Ferguson, Jr. at the Conference on Trade and the Future of American Workers, Washington, D.C. October 7, 2004. Free Trade: What Do Economists Really Know?, available at The Federal Reserve Board, http://www.federalreserve.gov/BOARDDOCS/SPEECHES/2004/20041007/default.htm
[39] H1B Visa Requirements, available at H1 Base (work visa jobs & sponsorship solutions company), http://www.h1base.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=51&Itemid=3&info=H1B+Visa+Program:H1B+Information+and+Service+Center
[40] Jeff Horwich, One World, Two Companies, available at Minnesota Public Radio, http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2005/04/27_horwichj_outsourcing/
[41] Sue Spielman, Outsourcing in My Company? I do not think so., available at Sue Spielman's Blog, http://weblogs.java.net/blog/sspielman/archive/2003/08/outsourcing_in.html
(only used to demonstrate certain aspects of public opinion; not necessarily a reliable source for factual information)
[42] Outsourcing Legislation in the States, available at AeA (formerly the American Electronics Association), http://www.aeanet.org/GovernmentAffairs/gamb_StateOutsourceSummary.asp
[43] Jeff Cornwall, A Missing Dimension to the Outsourcing and Globalizaion Debate, available at Belmont University, http://forum.belmont.edu/cornwall/archives/001754.html
[44] Eric Roberts, The Impact of Offshoring on Developing Countries, available at Stanford University , http://cse.stanford.edu/class/cs201/projects-03-04/offshoring/impact.html
[46] Tanvir Chowdhury, A country Report by Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Service Software Companies in Bangladesh, available at Offshore Outsourcing Best Practices Association of Small and Medium Enterprises, http://www.oobp.org/Country-specific+Data/Bangladesh/default.aspx
[47] AOV Philippines Outsourcing Service, http://www.aovphilippinesoutsourcingservice.com/
[48] Outsourcing Solutions, Inc., http://www.outsourcing-services.net/
[49] Alison M. Kadzik, The Current Trend To Outsource Legal Work Abroad and the Ethical Issues Related to Such Practices, available at BNET, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3975/is_200607/ai_n17185857
[50] U.S. Shouldn't be Outsourcing its Security, available at U.S. Senator Christopher J. Dodd, http://dodd.senate.gov/index.php?q=node/3284
[52] Graeme Wearden, U.S Tech Protests EU Privacy Laws, available at ZDNet, http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-960134.html
[53] Accenture Privacy Policy, https://www.accenture.com/Global/AccenturePrivacyPolicy.htm
[54] Brickwork India, http://www.b2kcorp.com/index.html
[55] Trigent, http://www.trigent.com/index.htm
[57] John Covaleski, Outsourcing of Work Means Influx of Legal Issues: Lawyers try to get handle on a fledgling practice area, available at Law.com, http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1084824762314
[58] David Lazarus, A tough lesson on medical privacy: Pakistani transcriber threatens UCSF over back pay, available at SFGate, home of the San Fransisco Chronicle, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/10/22/MNGCO2FN8G1.DTL
[59] Robert McMillan, Offshore outsourcing cited in Florida data leak: State employees are being warned that their personal data may have been compromised, available at ComputerWorld, http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,109938,00.html?source=NLT_SEC&nid=109938
[45] Independent Task Force Report No. 58, National Security Consequences of U.S. Oil Dependence, available at Council on Foreign Relations, http://www.cfr.org/content/publications/attachments/EnergyTFR.pdf
[56] 2006 Outsourcing Bills, available at National Conference of State Legislatures, http://www.ncsl.org/programs/employ/outsourcing06.htm
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