Browsing by Subject "Outsourcing"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Branding a global identity: labor anxieties, conspicuous consumption, and middle class culture in Hyderabad, India.
    (2012-07) Aaftaab, Naheed Gina
    Since India's economic liberalization in the1980s, corporations in the U.S. and Europe have been outsourcing service and computer programming jobs to urban centers in India such as Hyderabad. In this period, numerous Indian national as well as international processes have gone into making Hyderabad a "global city," where information technology (IT) jobs in multinational corporations provide new kinds of cultural capital and prestige that are shaping global Indian middle class identities. In this dissertation, I critically analyze how global neoliberal discourses encounter established, local practices, changing the previous calculus of social relations as well as refashioning particular meanings of the "global." IT professionals have to adapt quickly to take advantage of opportunities in the new economy, while also conforming to social benchmarks of job security set by previous generations. IT professionals have found ways to "brand" themselves and their careers to find a more solid foothold in a transient, transnational job sector. The process of branding involves specific kinds of soft skill training, resume building, networking, and practices outside of the professional space to be recognized as a "quality IT professional." New urban spaces of consumption such as malls, theme parks, and consumer showrooms have become iconic sites of global consumerism that seek to cater to these global, IT professionals. The significance of these landscapes is dependent on everyday, repetitive actions and narratives about consumption that highlight the city's present international role. Consumer practices play a dual role, at once the site of claiming to be globally Indian and the site of accusatory assertions of the loss of Indian traditional culture and the incursion of Western frivolity. Instead of looking at "traditional" and "Western" as opposing influences, I investigate how these concepts are produced through consumer practices and narratives of consumption. Furthermore, processes of professionalization and consumerism are incorporated into a global, modern, Indian middle class and the politics of exclusion that they deploy; a politics that recognizes some as being in synch with global and national growth, and renders large sections of the population invisible or outside of the citizenry of the Indian nation.
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    Essays on global sourcing of technology projects.
    (2009-08) Mishra, Anant Abhijit
    The goal of this dissertation is to address two key challenges that have emerged from the increasing globalization of technology projects. One set of challenges relates to the choice of the type of project organization that is appropriate for a particular type of project work and scope. The other set of challenges relates to the identification of actionable strategies for improving project performance, given the type of project organization. Using a parsimonious classification scheme based on the distribution of project organizations across firm and/or geographical boundaries, this dissertation identifies five different types of project organizations that are used in practice: Collocated Insourcing, Distributed Insourcing, Outsourcing, Offshoring, and Offshore-Outsourcing. Following this conceptualization, primary data from 830 information technology and product development projects spanning more than 65 countries and 26 industries is used to examine specific sets of research questions underlying the focal challenges. This dissertation is organized into three essays. The first essay conducts a theoretically grounded empirical investigation into examining whether the impact of project uncertainty (technological uncertainty, requirements uncertainty, and architectural uncertainty) and project management style (project control and project autonomy) on project performance is dependent upon the type of project organization. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the results indicate that project organization types that span country boundaries (Offshoring and Offshore-Outsourcing) outperform Collocated Insourcing project organization, particularly in projects with higher requirements uncertainty and architectural uncertainty. Also, compared to Collocated Insourcing project organization, project control has a greater positive impact on project performance in Offshore-Outsourcing project organization, while project autonomy has a greater positive impact on project performance in Distributed Insourcing project organization. The second essay investigates the role of project organization type on the extent of product integration issues in a technology project and its consequent impact on project performance. Specifically, the extent of product integration issues in a project is measured by determining the extent of Design-Interface Misalignment--the incompatibility of interdependent task modules during the product integration phase--in a technology project. The results indicate that design-interface misalignment is significantly greater in projects that span country boundaries (Offshoring and Offshore-Outsourcing) compared to all types of domestic project organizations (Collocated Insourcing, Distributed Insourcing, and Outsourcing). Further, design-interface misalignment has a significant negative impact on project performance, and this impact is particularly severe in the case of Offshore-Outsourcing project organization compared to Collocated Insourcing project organization. The final essay presents a formal econometric specification for estimating the technical efficiency of a project, defined as the maximum attainable level of project outputs for a given level of project inputs. An econometric model that includes a structural factor (type of project organization) and several infrastructural factors (risk management planning, agile management practices, face-to-face interaction, and employee turnover) to explain the variation in technical efficiency across projects is specified. The results indicate that the choice of the type of project organization is associated with the technical efficiency of a project: Distributed project organizations, particularly Offshoring and Offshore-Outsourcing, exhibit significantly lower technical efficiency compared to Collocated Insourcing project organization. Further, as expected, employee turnover is negatively associated with the technical efficiency of a project. In contrast, project management practices such as risk management planning, agile management, and face-to-face interaction are positively associated with the technical efficiency of projects. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the key findings from each of the three essays. Limitations and directions for future research are also identified.
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    Essays On Trade And Productivity
    (2018-05) Chan, Mons
    This dissertation consists of two chapters. The first chapter extends economic theory and empirical methods to examine firm outsourcing decisions. Empirical models of production often impose input complementarity and rule out an extensive margin in the decision to "make or buy" inputs. This paper develops a simple model of production which generalizes the standard Cobb-Douglas approach and allows labor and intermediates of similar types (or "tasks") to be complements, substitutes, or (importantly) outsourced entirely. Modeling this make-or-buy decision directly allows me to correct for the selection bias resulting from the endogenous outsourcing decision and to characterize the extensive margin of factor demand. I take the model to unique Danish data on task-level purchases of disaggregated labor (e.g., truck drivers), goods, and services (e.g., shipping) and find that labor and intermediates are gross substitutes. Estimated elasticities of substitution range from 1.5 to 4, with positive cross-price elasticities between 0 to 2 across inputs and industries. These results also hold in standard firm data using total labor and intermediate expenditure variables. Aggregating across firms, I show that demand for labor is becoming increasingly price elastic over time, driven by growing outsourcing and specialization. To illustrate the importance of allowing for flexible substitutability, I examine the effect of an increase in minimum wages in the Danish manufacturing industry, finding that ignoring outsourcing underestimates disemployment by 40%. This finding also has important implications for estimating productivity. I estimate the effect of recent decreases in Danish import tariffs on firm productivity and show that controlling for substitution triples the results relative to benchmark models which only control for price effects. In the second chapter, my coauthor, Ming Xu, and I investigate how trade costs and firm make-or-buy decisions have an impact on the aggregate wage distribution. Firms react to changes in factor prices with intensive and extensive-margin employment adjustments at the occupational-level. We study the distributional and aggregate consequences of this make-or-buy dynamic by developing a novel network model of heterogeneous firm-to-firm trade where the boundary of each firm depends on factor prices and firm-occupation comparative advantage in input-production. We show that the model can be easily aggregated and taken to industry-level data, and use the calibrated model to examine recent trends in employment, wages and trade in the USA. We use public OES and CPS data to show empirical evidence that a significant fraction of the growth in wage inequality in the USA is due to changes in firm/industry specialization and occupation sorting. To understand and measure the underlying causes of these trends, we calibrate the model to occupation and industry data from the OES and input-output tables. The results suggest that 1/3rd of the increases in wage inequality stem from decreases in inter-industry trade frictions with the remaining 2/3rds stemming from changes in technology and labor supply. Falling trade frictions are also responsible for all of the increases in occupational sorting and concentration. Had trade frictions been held at their 2002 level, productivity growth would have led to an increase in vertical integration, rather than the decrease observed in the data.
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    Outsourcing Human Resource activities: measuring the hidden costs and benefits.
    (2009-04) Norman, Thomas James
    This thesis contributes to the literature on human resource management (HRM) and business process outsourcing (BPO) in three important ways. First, this is the first study to report on the level of human resource outsourcing (HRO) for 34 distinct human resource management activities. Currently, the vast majority of the information available on HRO comes from consultant reports (Aberdeen Group, 2006; Equaterra, 2008; Towers Perrin, 2008) and articles in the popular press (Engardio, et al., 2006). Only a handful of academic studies (Gilly, Greer and Rasheed, 2004; Lawler, Boundreau and Mohrman, 2006) have systematically measured HRO. Second, this study examines the impact of HRO on organizational outcomes by attempting to detect an association between levels of outsourcing different types of HRM activities and three dependent variables: employee turnover, employee satisfaction, and customer satisfaction. Third, this study reports the assessments of several dozen expert raters as to the attributes of the 34 measured HRM activities and their suitability for outsourcing. The data set contains organizational data collected from multiple sources, including HR vice-presidents, CFOs, HR professionals, managers, organizational archives and publically available financial records. The evidence suggests that HRO levels vary along with the predictions of transaction cost economics and that outsourcing certain HRM activities may be associated with employee retention.