Search results for "OUTSOURCING"
showing 10 items of 101 documents
Outsourcing within the Nordic context: Care services for older people in Finland.
2018
The early 1990s economic setback brought significant reforms favoring the outsourcing of care in Finnish municipalities. Here, outsourcing refers to the practice of municipalities employing private organizations through different means (e.g., open tendering) to deliver public care services. In this context, this study examines the growth in the outsourcing of service housing and home-help services in 311 municipalities from 2001 to 2015 and investigates the municipal factors associated with outsourcing using four dimensions: care needs, population size, economic situation, and political ideology of the municipality. The findings reveal a steep increase in the outsourcing of home-help and se…
Transnational turn and national models of higher education - The case of Finland
2014
The purpose of the article is to problematize the relationship between the Nordic democratic public higher education tradition and transnational market driven knowledge economy policies. The article illustrates this development with two cases -- quality assurance and internationalisation policies -- where external demands, based mostly on market ideologies, have been introduced with apparently transnational incentives but having national implementations. These transnational pressures are related to a kind of soft governance of higher education policy, characterized by networked decision making and use of expert consultants, which possibly promotes flexible decision-making and efficiency, bu…
The curvilinear effect of manufacturing outsourcing and captive-offshoring on firms' innovation: The role of temporal endurance
2019
Abstract This paper aims to contribute to the open debate in the literature on the effect of global sourcing strategies on firm performance by studying the consequences of manufacturing outsourcing and captive-offshoring for the innovation capability of the firm. We grounded our hypotheses based on the outsourcing and offshoring literature and by narrowing our focus to the effects of persisting in their adoption over time. We tested our hypotheses using data from a sample of 368 manufacturing companies listed on NASDAQ stock market. The paper provides theoretical explanations and empirical findings for the inverted U-shaped influence of keeping doing captive-offshoring on new product develo…
Outsourcing and efficiency: the case of Spanish citrus farming
2006
Outsourcing in agriculture has traditionally been seen as a managerial strategy of smaller farms to achieve higher levels of efficiency. In this article, we provide empirical evidence supporting the existence of a positive relationship between outsourcing and efficiency in Spanish citrus farming. Outsourcing is measured by the proportion of outsourced labor and capital in farms' total use of these production factors, i.e., the higher the proportion of outsourced inputs, the higher the degree of outsourcing. Making use of data envelopment analysis techniques, we compute input-specific reductions required to achieve technical efficiency at the farm level. Our results show that attainment of t…
ON THE HETEROGENEOUS EMPLOYMENT EFFECTS OF OFFSHORING: IDENTIFYING PRODUCTIVITY AND DOWNSIZING CHANNELS
2014
I. INTRODUCTION For the most part of the last two decades Germany suffered from a hangover of the reunification boom, an overvalued exchange rate, high unemployment, and low growth--so The Economist famously named it the "Sick Man of Europe." At the same time, German companies were relocating production, restructuring, and offshoring. The general public associated such offshoring activities--not only in Germany--with plant closures which made the headlines and confirmed the perception that offshoring was a job killer.1 What usually does not make the news is that such downsizing effects of offshoring may be counterbalanced by productivity effects in the restructuring firm. Depending on their…
LA ESTRATEGIA DE OUTSOURCING INTERNACIONAL EN ESPAÑA: UNA APROXIMACIÓN A LOS SECTORES MANUFACTUREROS TRADICIONALES
2009
RESUMENEn los últimos años el uso por parte de las empresas de la estrategia de outsourcing en sus dos vertientes (nacional e internacional)1 está siendo una práctica habitual en los países desarrollados, especialmente en los sectores manufactureros tradicionales. Dado el desarrollo experimentado y las implicaciones técnico-productivas y sociales que se derivan de su implementación, en este trabajo analizamos cuál ha sido la tendencia de esa estrategia en estos sectores durante el periodo 1985-2004 y contrastamos qué relación existe entre ésta y dos de sus principales factores determinantes: el tamaño y la experiencia internacional. De los resultados más generales se desprende que el outsou…
Within and between firm trends in job polarization : the roles of globalization and technology
2019
AbstractWe analyze occupational polarization within and across firms using a census of matched employer–employee panel data from Finland in the period of 2000–2014. As in most industrialized countries, the Finnish occupational distribution has polarized over the last decades. Using decomposition analysis, we find that jobs involving low-level service tasks increase mostly through the entry dynamics, while the high-level abstract task share increases largely within continuing firms. Worker-level occupational mobility points to some skill upgrading within continuing firms, while labor force entry and retirement contribute the polarizing trend. Instrumental variables (IVs) regressions confirm …
An Exploratory Case Study of Offshore Outsourcing: Problems in Multicultural Settings
2014
Outsourcing means using factors which are external to an organization to perform its functions whereas offshore outsourcing relies on using foreign resources to perform those functions. We focus in this paper on offshore outsourcing of information systems (ISs). We have conducted an exploratory case study of outsourcing IS support services. The services have been outsourced by a supplier organization which has been based in Finland. Main parts of its customer support services have been allocated to so-called production centers, which have been located in three countries; Latvia, India, and the Philippines. We have gathered qualitative data from nine experts via theme-based interviews. The e…
Risk management in offshore outsourcing of software production using the ICT-supported unified process model: A cross-case study
2008
Successful execution of ICT-supported unified process of offshore outsourcing (ICT-SUPOO) of software development can offer various important benefits. However, ICT-SUPOO of software development is very complex and risky, and often fails. Almost no empirical studies are available on the risk factors that affect the ICT-SUPOO. The objective of this study is to investigate the key risk factors associated with ICT-SUPOO, understand how they create risks, and how the risks can be alleviated. We carry out a multiple case study from both of the vendorpsilas and clientpsilas sites, where professionals with extensive experience in managing offshore outsourcing of software development were interview…
Structural Source of the Trap of ICT Advancement - Lessons from World ICT Top Leaders
2014
In light of the significant consequence of the trap of dramatic advancement of information and communication technology (ICT) in the global economy, both nations and firms that have been compelling their productivity decline. This resulted in great stagnation of ICT advanced economies and therefore its structural sources were analyzed. Based on an empirical analysis tracing, the trend in marginal productivity of ICT and its subsequent prices among the top ICT leaders in the world over the last two decades correlating with the effects of ICT, two faces of ICT advancement were identified. On one side, advancement of ICT contributes to its prices increase by new functionality development, its …