Work, the Job, and Professional Careers with Outsourcing Companies: Theorizing About Job Quality and Loss

• In Event: 256 - Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 09. Job Satisfaction and Turnover

Abstract

Through qualitative interviews representing 20 cases of outsourcing information technology (IT; N=16) and human resource (HR; N=4) jobs, I found differences in rates of job loss in these sectors as well as varied effects on the professional challenges in this work at outsourcing companies. Findings suggest that institutional and environmental factors have important effects on outcomes of job quality and job loss with outsourcing.
Institutionally, it matters whether the job function is tied to the company’s core competency. The IT function is more readily linked to a retailer’s goals of getting the right products in stock for related seasons, for example, and when to mark up or mark down. As a result, fewer jobs in IT are lost when a company outsources this function today. Human resources work is mostly perceived as costly in relation to the company’s bottom line. This has significant consequences for job loss and quality with HR outsourcing. Environmentally, regulatory constraints on the work correspond with job loss and poorer job quality outcomes with outsourcing. This is clearly seen in the HR cases. Although the variation in outcomes may give a reason to hope against the inevitability of negative outcomes, the commonalities of the work across these employment sectors (e.g., its new organization and speedup) shows that strategies designed to control, standardize work, and deskill jobs are being applied by outsourcing companies, which will inevitably function to degrade work in the IT and HR professions with time.

Author

• Jacqueline M. Zalewski, West Chester University