When I ask people what they think of when they hear the word “outsourcing,” most commonly I get the “ideal type” answer. It is an image long associated with outsourcing: information technology (IT) jobs that get shipped overseas to countries like India.
Yet offshoring – the more appropriate term for this example – did not define the type of outsourcing affecting my friends and family or people I have come to know through my research. Their examples were best characterized as “in-house outsourcing,” a form of outsourcing where outsourced employees remain onsite in their current environment, but work instead for a different company, as an onsite “vendor.”
In my new book, I sought to learn more about how in-house outsourcing was affecting professionals in IT and other fields. While IT has been most often targeted, in 2005, “cost centers” like human resources (HR), accounting, and other job fields were also increasingly outsourced.
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