Outsourcing: National- and firm-level implications

As the pace of outsourcing has continued to accelerate, so too has interest in the topic on the part of researchers, practitioners, and policy makers. Despite this increasing interest, there remains a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the outsourcing phenomenon. In particular, its effects on organizations and nations remain the subject of intense debate. In this commentary, we address this topic by discussing what constitutes outsourcing, public policy concerns about outsourcing, governmental responses to outsourcing, and a variety of firm-level issues related to outsourcing.