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

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). 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.