Offshoring and Outsourcing Potentials: Evidence from German Micro‐Level Data

This paper provides two indicators that measure: (i) offshoring potentials (cross‐country geographical relocation) and (ii) outsourcing potentials (organisational relocation) separately at the level of jobs, occupations, tasks and industries. We use four waves of the BIBB/BAuA Labour Force Survey in Germany and apply principal component analysis based on a large set of potential determinants of offshoring and outsourcing derived from the literature. Our results show significant variation across these levels in the determinants of both dimensions. We provide a comprehensive empirical classification of the determinants of how easily jobs can be offshored and outsourced. This can serve as a basis for further research to investigate the economic effects of job offshoreability.     

Stakeholder Perceptions of Risk in Mandatory Corporate Responsibility Disclosure

Journal of Business Ethics - The extraction of natural resources is a controversial business practice that has profound ethical and economic risk implications for both firms involved in extractive...     

Delocalisation and ICT Outsourcing in the CEEC Countries: The Role of Proximities

In a rapidly changing global context, this article sets out to examine certain tendencies which bring themes of international trade and economic geography of territories into close relation. It seems increasingly difficult to explain strategies of firms without reference to the logic, which dictates where they locate their productive activities. We tried to identify the role of ICT in determining the logic of localisation, mainly by analysing the situation in East European transition countries through an approach based on the economy of proximities.     

The Role of NGOs in CSR: Mutual Perceptions Among Stakeholders

This paper explores the role of NGOs in corporate social responsibility (CSR) through an analysis of various stakeholders’ perceptions and of NGOs’ self-perceptions. In the course of qualitative research based in Spain, we found that the perceptions of the role of NGOs fall into four categories: recognition of NGOs as drivers of CSR; concerns about their legitimacy; difficulties in the mutual understanding between NGOs and trade unions; the self-confidence of NGOs as important players in CSR. Each of these categories comprises the various elements analysed in the paper. We found some discrepancies between the perception of others and the self-perceptions of NGOs, which explains why their role is often controversial. The research confirms that secondary stakeholders, such as NGOs, are key players in CSR, but their role is still regarded as controversial and their legitimacy contested. Deep-seated misunderstandings and mistrust among various stakeholder groups (particularly between NGOs and trade unions) are a possible hurdle to the integration of social and environmental concerns in business activity and corporate governance in Spain. The study finds that business managers need to take a less firm-centric and a more contextual approach, and look more closely into the relationship with and among stakeholder groups. For NGO managers, the research shows that NGOs are not always aware of the stereotypes they generate and the problems caused mainly by what is seen as ambivalent roles: critic and counsellor, accuser and judge, idealist and fund raiser.

The Role of Perceptions in Predicting Donor Value

Explores the role of donor perceptions in predicting the value of a donor, both to the voluntary sector as a whole and to specific organisations. Three classes of perceptual variable are examined; perceptions of the performance of the voluntary sector/specific organisations, perceptions of any exchange benefits that might accrue and in cases where a relationship already exists, perceptions of the quality of service quality provided. Drawing on results of an empirical study of 5000 donors to ten large national charities, the paper concludes that all three classes of perceptual variable have the capacity to influence donor value.     

Ethical Issues in Outsourcing: The Case of Contract Medical Research and the Global Pharmaceutical Industry

The outsourcing of medical research has become a strategic imperative in the global pharmaceutical industry. Spurred by the challenges of competition, the need for speed in drug development, and increasing domestic costs, pharmaceutical companies across the globe continue to outsource critical parts of their value chain activities, namely contract clinical research and drug testing, to sponsors across the globe, typically into emerging markets. While it is clear that important ethical issues arise with this practice, unraveling moral responsibility and the allocation of responsibility is not so clear, considering that contracts, by their very definition transfer responsibility from the principal to the agent. This research provides a framework for exploring some of the ethical issues, including attributions of moral responsibility associated with Contract Medical Research. Using a theory of strategic and moral behavior, the research shows that both clients and sponsors in contract research have individual and collective responsibility to ensure that due care and diligence is exercised in the performance of clinical research. The research suggests some guidelines for stakeholder action.     

Offshoring: Political Myths and Economic Reality

Overseas outsourcing, commonly known as offshoring, is an aspect of globalisation that has attracted significant political and media attention. In this lecture David Smith discusses the phenomenon and examines the costs and benefits both to the companies and countries from which activities are being outsourced and to the host economy. He concludes from a review of the evidence that there are indeed significant benefits, and that they mainly accrue to the outsourcing country, in the form of lower inflation, faster growth in real incomes and an improved product‐ivity performance (the shift to higher value‐added activities). So why is there so much political sensitivity about offshoring? One is that, unlike in the case of manufacturing, the jobs being offshored are commonly seen as those in which advanced economies retain comparative advantage. Another is that the new, higher value‐added jobs that will be created are in areas and activities that barely exist at present. The biggest problem, he concludes, is that while the victims of offshoring can be easily identified, and have a political constituency, the gains are spread more thinly across the economy. This is the challenge for economists and pro‐free trade politicians.     

Offshoring and unemployment: The role of search frictions labor mobility

In a two-sector, general-equilibrium model with labor-market search frictions, we find that the wage increases and sectoral unemployment decreases upon offshoring in the presence of perfect intersectoral labor mobility. If, as a result, labor moves to the sector with the lower (or equal) vacancy costs, there is an unambiguous decrease in economywide unemployment. With imperfect intersectoral labor mobility, unemployment in the offshoring sector can rise, with an unambiguous unemployment reduction in the non-offshoring sector. Imperfect labor mobility can result in a mixed equilibrium in which only some firms offshore, with unemployment in the offshoring sector rising.     

Chinese Perceptions of Issues and Obstacles Confronting Joint Ventures

In China one of the most effective means of attracting foreign capital to undertake its four modernizations is through the creation of joint ventures. The Chinese are striving for pragmatic results and emphasize that joint ventures should provide mutual benefits for both parties. Many joint ventures should provide mutual benefits for both parties. Many joint venture participants from the U.S.A. have become disillusioned and are frustrated by obstacles including government bureaucreatic interference, cultural differences, and a lack of managerial know-how by the Chinese. Based on a survey of 182 Chinese businessmen, 100 of whom engaged in joint ventures, it is evident that the CHinese share these concerns. Their perceptions provide guidelines for coping with these obstacles and clearly indicate the importance of "quanxi" in attaining the goals of joint ventures.     

Offshoring and occupational wages: Some empirical evidence

Offshoring has changed the pattern of international competition; labor in specific occupations rather than whole firms and sectors are now facing competition. Accordingly, wages in offshorable occupations are affected in new ways. In this article, we investigate the effects of offshoring on relative occupational wages in 13 countries for 1990–2003. Our findings show that offshoring competiveness is associated with higher relative wages in offshorable occupations, and that export growth of IT-related services leads to higher relative wages in offshorable occupations, whereas import growth of such services reduces them.     

Controversial Advert Perceptions in SNS Advertising: The Role of Ethical Judgement and Religious Commitment

This study attempts to advance knowledge in the area of controversial advertising by examining the antecedents and consequences of controversial advert perceptions in the context of social media, and particularly social networking sites (SNS). Specifically, we explore how ethical judgement and religious commitment shape controversial advert perceptions leading to attitudes towards the advert, brand attitudes and purchase intentions. Our results indicate that when a SNS advert is judged to be ethically acceptable, the level of perceived advert controversy is lower. However, the impact of ethical judgement on controversial advert perceptions becomes significant and positive when intrapersonal commitment and interpersonal religious commitment are introduced as moderators. This result implies that the level of religious commitment changes the ethical judgement–controversial advert perceptions relationship. The results also highlight that controversial advert perceptions negatively influence attitude towards the advert. The study contributes to the limited knowledge on controversial advertising on SNS, yielding significant and relevant implications for academics and advertisers alike, in their effort to improve advertising effectiveness without offending or alienating target audiences.     

From Rationality to Emotionally Embedded Relations: Envy as a Signal of Power in Stakeholder Relations

Journal of Business Ethics - Although stakeholder salience theory has received a great deal of scholarly attention in the business ethics and management literature, the theory has been criticized...     

Offshoring of Tasks: Taylorism Versus Toyotism

This paper contributes to the recent debate on trade in tasks, drawing on insights from the theory of the firm as well as recent developments in trade theory. Recent empirical literature suggests that between 20 and 30 per cent of all jobs in key OECD countries could be digitised and offshored. This study offers a cluster analysis which documents that offshorable and non‐offshorable tasks tend to be performed together across occupations. Therefore, when assessing the offshorability of a job, one needs to take into account all tasks being performed by the worker and the gains from fragmenting jobs versus the benefits of multi‐tasked workers (taylorism versus toyotism). Furthermore, one needs to distinguish between fragmentation of production and fragmentation of jobs.     

Why trucks jump: Offshoring and product characteristics

In this paper, we study the role of vertical product differentiation in the decision to allocate production between domestic and foreign plants. To do so, we examine the first wave of light-truck offshoring to Mexico that occurred due to substantially lower post-NAFTA trade barriers and a coincident increase in US demand for light trucks. In contrast to the typical assumption, but similar to many other industries, the need for additional capacity was accommodated by investment in both the US and Mexico for the same models of light trucks. Using a new dataset that details the extent of offshoring and domestic production within models, we document sharp differences in how capacity was utilized. Specifically, within models, we find that automakers offshored varieties which tend to be older in design vintage, lower scale, and less complex to produce. In contrast, we find that varieties “inshored” to newer capacity in the US exhibit the opposite characteristics. This highlights the important role of vertical differentiation and the associated variation in production complexity for the sorting of production across borders. A product with a large degree of vertical differentiation may provide scope for a firm to maximize profits by “inshoring” the more complex varieties while offshoring the less complex versions.     

The Stakeholder Approach: A Sustainability Perspective

This article considers the stakeholder approach (SHA) to organisational management through the lens of what it means for humans to live sustainably on the Earth (that is, for there to be a sustainable world). In particular, the article considers if the SHA, as it is presented in mainstream academic and management literature, is supportive of corporate practices that advance the achievement of a sustainable world. The analysis shows the SHA to have significant failings in this regard when viewed against key sustainable world criteria, with issues of concern evident from the normative core of the SHA through to is practical application in the management setting.     

Building Trust Between Consumers and Corporations: The Role of Consumer Perceptions of Transparency and Social Responsibility

Developing trust in a company is a significant part of building the company-consumer relationship. Previous studies have sought to identify the positive consequences of trust such as loyalty and repurchase, but the question of what builds trust remains largely unanswered. To answer the question, we developed a model that depicts the relationships among transparency, social responsibility, trust, attitude, word-of-mouth (WOM) intention, and purchase intention. An online survey was conducted with a US nationwide sample of 303 consumers, and the data were analyzed using the structural equation modeling method. The results indicated that consumers’ perceptions of a corporation’s efforts to be transparent in the production and labor conditions and to be socially responsible by giving back to the local community directly affected these consumers’ trust and attitudes toward the corporation, and indirectly affected their intentions to purchase from and spread positive WOM about the corporation. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

The Primordial Stakeholder: Advancing the Conceptual Consideration of Stakeholder Status for the Natural Environment

This article furthers the argument for a stakeholder theory that integrates into managerial decision-making the relationship between business organizations and the natural environment. The authors review the literature on stakeholder theory and the debate over whom or what should count as a stakeholder. The authors also critique and expand the stakeholder identification and salience model developed by Mitchell and Wood (1997) by reconceptualizing the stakeholder attributes of power, legitimacy, and urgency, as well as by developing a fourth stakeholder attribute: proximity. In this way, the authors provide a stronger basis for arguing for the salience of the natural environment as the primary and primordial stakeholder of the firm.     

Stakeholder Theory and Managerial Decision-Making: Constraints and Implications of Balancing Stakeholder Interests

Stakeholder theory is widely recognized as a management theory, yet very little research has considered its implications for individual managerial decision-making. In the two studies reported here, we used stakeholder theory to examine managerial decisions about balancing stakeholder interests. Results of Study 1 suggest that indivisible resources and unequal levels of stakeholder saliency constrain managers’ efforts to balance stakeholder interests. Resource divisibility also influenced whether managers used a within-decision or an across-decision approach to balance stakeholder interests. In Study 2 we examined instrumental and normative implications of these two approaches. We conclude by considering the contributions of this research.     

Service Offshoring and Productivity: Evidence from the US

The practice of sourcing service inputs from overseas suppliers has been growing in response to new technologies that have made it possible to trade in some business and computing services that were previously considered non‐tradable. This paper estimates the effects of offshoring on productivity in US manufacturing industries between 1992 and 2000. It finds that service offshoring has a significant positive effect on productivity in the United States, accounting for around 10 per cent of labour productivity growth during this period. Offshoring material inputs also have a positive effect on productivity, but the magnitude is smaller accounting for approximately 5 per cent of productivity growth.