IS OFFSHORING AN INTERNATIONAL PROCESS ONLY FROM DEVELOPED COUNTRIES TO EMERGING ECONOMIES?

Informações

Código: ESO2287
Divisão: ESO - Estratégia em Organizações
Tema de Interesse: Tema 08 - Negócios Internacionais

Autores

Paulo Roberto Gião, Allègre L. Hadida

Resumo

The offshoring business is booming and what was used by few US pioneers are nowspreading through the world (Economist Intelligent Unit, 2006). It is a very new issue at leastregarding the origin of the expression and related to services and, even a common sensedefinition with a complete detailed explanation clarifying the cases is not available.Mol (2007), for instance, presents a variety of conceptual lens has been applied tooutsourcing (and also can be applied to offshoring process): transaction cost economics,resource-based view, core competences, micro-economics, industrial organization, amongothers. From this list of perspectives, in this article we propose to analyze the applicability oftransaction cost economics - TCE (Coase, 1937; Williamson, 1975, 1979) through itscharacteristic make-or-buy expression, considering the offshoring pace and emergingeconomy firms. The make-or-buy decision must be flexible enough to explain offshoringcharacteristics and developed and emerging economy firms scenarios. As secondaryobjectives, and to show the trail to the main purpose, two research questions were identifiedand discussed during the paper: Is offshoring process an international movement only fromdeveloped countries to emerging economies? Is the main reason of offshoring the looking forlow-cost work / activities?To achieve the proposed objectives, the structure of this paper begins with areasonable or acceptable definition of offshoring. Some reasons (or “the reason”) for theprocess are also another important starting point. The majority of articles referee the idea thatlow-cost is the main reason for offshoring, and if it is correct, transaction cost economicsseems to be a good basis for our analysis purpose and integrative intention. Also someliterature connections between offshoring and TCE are presented and, naturally TCE ispresented in highlights for understanding these connections. Ending this section, somedifferent arguments based on newer researches are presented by some authors presentinganother perspective as the main reason.After this theoretical approach, a scenario analysis and some discussions are presentedbased on all possible interactions among firm from developed (DC) and emerging economies(EE) and examples of international corporations are presented to clarify and improve theunderstanding of our research questions and to build new contributions to internationalbusiness theory.When analyzing all possible developed and emerging countries’ interactions, we arguethat only looking for skills, capabilities, competences, etc., can be considered the main reasonfor offshoring to unify developed and emerging countries perspectives. Developed countryfirms have the additional benefit of low cost but considering the execution of same activities,so the same work (using similar skills, capabilities or competences) done with low cost. Afterall, final remarks are presented and some futures studies are proposed taking advantages ofthe pace of offshoring process.

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