The Influence of Outsourced/ Offshored Business Services on the Conceptualization of Career at the Receiving End

• In Event: 50220 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 20: Workplace Belonging

Abstract

Recently, Eastern Europe became home to a thriving business service sector operating on the basis of offshoring/outsourcing models. A layer of jobs with a middle-class appearance emerged especially in countries’ large university cities. Although the mainstream narrative is built on celebrating successful cities, the trade-offs of such processes are rarely part of the conversation. The paper builds on the assumption that outsourcing/ offshoring are inherently spatial processes, besides their economic rationales. It looks at place as a social context for making career decisions. It asks How do outsourcing/ offshoring processes shape the perspectives of graduates on their careers? The paper explores the economic, social and political implications of the internal relocation of graduates, based on face-to-face interviews with 81 graduates, HR staff and managers at different levels of seniority working in the mid-tier business service sector in Romania. The article comes from the interdisciplinary area of Youth Studies; it is informed by the structure of opportunity approach and human geography. It examines the dilemmas of young people when managing aspirations for success elsewhere with the sense of social distance from their birthplace while influenced by the allure of urban consumption and culture. It argues that employment opportunities are regionally framed, and so is the idea of career progression of young people. For young people (both moving or remaining in their home regions), space comes with a subjective load, including a range of options that one considers feasible. Ultimately, the paper contributes to the literature challenging the assumption that the benefits of outsourcing/ offshoring are undifferentiated distributed at national level. It argues that having the national state as the unit of analysis for the implications of outsourcing/ offshoring presents only a partial view and calls for considering the internal differentiations at regional level and the social implications of unequal economic development they generated.

Author

• Maria-Carmen Pantea, Universitatea 'Babes Bolyai'