The nature of international trade is changing. For centuries, trade mostly entailed an exchange of goods. Now it increasingly involves bits of value being added in many different locations, or what might be called trade in tasks. Revolutionary advances in transportation and communications technology have weakened the link between labor specialization and geographic concentration, making it incr...

Symbiosis means the intimate living together of two dissimilar organisms in a mutually beneficial relationship, or a cooperative relationship. IT-outsourcing and off-shoring is momentarily far from a symbiosis. This proposal is meant to understand how sourcing can become true symbiosis between the involved parties, hence the name of our proposal. The importance of IT-outsourcing increased signi...

Offshoring has become feasible because of rapid advances in information technologies and information resource management techniques. Conversely, offshoring is playing a growing role in the design, development, implementation, and testing of new information technologies. This special issue focuses on this interdependence aspect of offshoring and outsourcing. Now there are numerous examples of of...

This article is about the role played by trust in structuring and shaping offshoring processes and how cultural differences interfere and play a mediating role within these inter firms relationships. Our study conducted within three IT services providers companies established in Tunisia has provided a dataset that has first confirmed the structuring role of trust in terms of transferability eff...

The central thesis of this paper is that Mathematical Economics can provide a novel approach to the examination of offshoring business decisions and provide an impetus for future research in the area. A growing body of research indicates that projected cost savings from IT offshoring projects are not being met. Furthermore, evidence suggests that decision-making processes have been more emotion...

 This essay challenges claims by economists and management scholars that ‘offshoring’ is simply another form of trade with mutual benefits. I argue that reducing wages through offshoring leads to wealth creation for shareholders but not necessarily for countries and employees, and that many displaced workers have difficulty ‘trading up’ to higher skilled jobs. Offshoring is a new phenom...

We analyze the relationship between offshoring and the onshore workforce composition in German multinational enterprises (MNEs), using plant data that allow us to discern tasks, occupations, and workforce skills. Offshoring is associated with a statistically significant shift towards more non-routine and more interactive tasks, and with a shift towards highly educated workers. Moreover, the shi...

We use plant-level evidence for Germany to explore the productivity effects of offshoring small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) compare them those derived a sample large companies. SMEs usually face tighter resource constraints than larger companies, thus making it harder reap potential gains associated with offshoring. find group that plants offshore business activities tend be among more p...

IND Pub In a representative sample of 13,683 U.S. employees, we compared survivors of layoffs, offshoring, outsourcing, and their combinations to a group who experienced no downsizing. Survivors of layoffs perceived lower organizational performance, job security, affective attachment, calculative attachment, and had higher turnover intentions. Offshoring survivors perceived lower performance, f...

In a representative sample of 13,683 U.S. employees, we compared survivors of layoffs, offshoring, outsourcing, and their combinations to a group who experienced no downsizing. Survivors of layoffs perceived lower organizational performance, job security, affective attachment, calculative attachment, and had higher turnover intentions than the comparison. Offshoring survivors perceived lower pe...