Global sourcing and development: New drivers, models, and impacts

摘要

This special section on Global Sourcing and Development: New Drivers, Models and Impacts brings together 3 related discourses. The first discourse of global sourcing has a rich body of literature in information systems and is defined as the process and organisation through which work is contracted or delegated to an external or internal entity that could be physically located anywhere—typically in low-cost countries. It encompasses various outsourcing arrangements such as offshore outsourcing, captive offshoring, nearshoring, and onshoring (Oshri, Kotlarsky, & Willcocks, 2015). The second discourse is a relatively smaller body of literature located mainly in the Information Communication Technology for Development literature that analyses the contribution of global sourcing to development (eg, Heeks, 1996 1996). Sein and Harindranath (2004) classify the 3 main perspectives on development as modernisation, dependency and human development. Building on these perspectives on development brings us to the third discourse—new drivers, models, and impacts introduced by this special issue. Put briefly, the initial phase of global sourcing in the 1980s and 90s was focussed on establishing the technical and financial feasibility of the global sourcing model of work. For companies in the West, a primary driver was cost reduction to achieve competitive advantage. For the provider firms such as in India, the motivation focussed on rapid growth, furthering employment and gaining more visibility on the global sourcing stage. Once the feasibility of such work was established, from the 1990s onwards, many countries followed India and Israel, such as Costa Rica and Iran. Different sourcing models emerged such as nearshoring and insourcing. As these models of work matured, some reverse innovations became visible, with large sourcing firms in India even buying out technology developers in the United States and Europe. Various forms of backlash to this spread of outsourcing also emerged, as evidenced recently by President Trump's political agenda of “Make America Great Again”. Currently, a new trend in global sourcing is development, which is manifested as “impact sourcing”, the focus of this issue. The first example of global sourcing involved software contracts outsourced to India in the late 1970s. In those early days, the trade was comprised of the physical transfer of coding specifications to “software factories” mainly in India and the return of code delivered on physical media (such as tapes and discs) sent via courier. An example of such a firm is India's Infosys and Narayana Murthy then CEO of a startup who was interviewed in the 1980s by one of the editors of this issue (Richard Heeks). This early stage in the development of global sourcing also involved the physical movement of engineers, again mainly from India, to client sites in the United States and Western Europe, the practice of which became known as “bodyshopping”. Since then we have observed a year-on-year realisation of Moore's Law in the form of a spectacular increase in capacity of computing, a dramatic reduction in cost and the convergence of computing with telecommunications, all of which are familiar to readers of this journal. These technological advances have been concomitant with advances in software development management including structured methods and standards such as ISO9000 and the stages of the Capability Maturity Model. All these factors taken together catapulted the practice of global sourcing and its expansion across 3 dimensions: scale, geographical spread, and range of service offerings. Dealing first with scale, during the editors' respective careers researching the global sourcing phenomenon, we have witnessed spectacular year on year growth to a global market size in 2014 of US$104.6 billion (2014). * Meeting the demand are the global sourcing providers, geographically spread in clusters around the world. Since 2004, the management consulting firm A.T. K