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The offshoring-fuelled growth of the Central and Eastern European business services sector gave rise to shared service centres (SSCs) – quasi-autonomous entities providing routine-intensive tasks for the central organisation. The advent of technologies such as intelligent process automation, robotic process automation, and artificial intelligence jeopardises SSCs’ employment model, necessitating workers’ skills adaptation. The study challenges the deskilling hypothesis and reveals that automation in the Polish SSCs is conducive to upskilling and worker autonomy. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews, we highlight the negotiated nature of automation processes shaped by interactions between headquarters, SSCs, and their workers. Workers actively participated in automation processes, eliminating the most mundane tasks. This resulted in upskilling, higher job satisfaction, and empowerment. Yet, this phenomenon heavily depends upon the fact that automation is triggered by labour shortages, which limit the expansion of SSCs. This situation encourages companies to leverage the specific expertise entrenched in their existing workforce. The study underscores the importance of fostering employee-driven automation and upskilling initiatives for overall job satisfaction and quality.
Amidst the global digital transformation and the expanding IT sector, particularly in Ukraine, it is essential to examine how digitalization affects structural shifts within the national economy. This study aims to analyze the impact of digitalization on the growth of Ukraine’s IT sector, focusing on comparing the economic metrics of freelancing and outsourcing and providing strategic recommendations to enhance entrepreneurial activity in this area. During the research, the methods of expert evaluations, economic-mathematical modelling, comparative analysis, and statistical data analysis were used. The research revealed that digitalization significantly influences structural changes in the national economy, particularly through the advancement of the IT sector. It was established that outsourcing has significant advantages compared to freelancing in terms of such indicators as the share of the GDP of the IT sector and the volume of exports of IT services. By analyzing the economic indicators of freelancing and outsourcing, specific recommendations were developed for the continued growth of Ukraine’s IT sector, aimed at boosting entrepreneurial activity and creating new job opportunities. The key factors influencing IT specialists’ employment choices were summarized, which is crucial for the continued development of the national economy in the context of digitalization. The practical value of this research is that its findings can be utilized to enhance Ukraine’s IT sector, particularly by backing outsourcing businesses and promoting the expansion of freelance platforms.
Apple's commercial triumph rests in part on the outsourcing of its consumer electronics production to Asia. Drawing on extensive fieldwork at China's leading exporter—the Taiwanese-owned Foxconn—the power dynamics of the buyer-driven supply chain are analysed in the context of the national terrains that mediate or even accentuate global pressures. Power asymmetries assure the dominance of Apple in price setting and the timing of product delivery, resulting in intense pressures and illegal overtime for workers. Responding to the high-pressure production regime, the young generation of Chinese rural migrant workers engages in a crescendo of individual and collective struggles to define their rights and defend their dignity in the face of combined corporate and state power.
This article explores the subjective experiences of transition to employment in the outsourced/offshored business service sector in Romania. Based on 138 interviews with junior and senior graduates, it maps how different ‘tidal economic waves’ associated with Romania’s economic transition have intersected working biographies since the 1990s. The paper argues that the sector generates many middle-class employment opportunities, legitimising consensus around the idea that ‘this is the best time to be young.’ Yet, informed by elements of political economy, it challenges the conventional repertoires of optimism. In doing so, it tentatively questions the long-term occupational prospects of those who take up entry-level positions in (arguably) automatable, on-the-move, and standardised jobs with lesser high-end value. The paper communicates using the structure of opportunity theory by highlighting how, alongside location, the concept of time (personal, historical, and company time) is woven into the work biographies of members of an under-researched group.
Chapter 4 traces a rising market of professional consultants and think tanks in policymaking and political activity. Upper-caste and elite-educated men have long filled positions of power, including parliamentary seats, administrative services, business groups, advisory boards, and chambers of commerce. Despite some shifts towards caste-based affirmative action since the 1980s, the political classes remain predominantly elite (Verniers and Jaffrelor 2020). In 2014, anti-incumbent sentiment led to widespread distrust in existing experts, such that elite intellectuals and Western-educated economists holding political and policymaking positions were replaced by technical professionals: engineers, business managers, and consultants. As an alternative to intellectual and insular elites, this group of professionals projects itself as politically agnostic, rational, and a practical source of business-minded knowledge. This group, however, is no less insular or exclusionary: one set of intellectual experts has merely been replaced by a more elite, deracinated group of professional consultants situated in global management consulting firms.
Chapter 3 identifies the numerous strategies the contemporary liberal states have pursued to navigate the cross-pressures engendered by the migration trilemma during the post-Cold War period, and especially since September 11th. Contesting scholarly claims that the liberal states cannot avert unwanted immigration, its main argument is that they have considerably reconciled the tensions inherent in the trilemma by enlisting and coopting non-central state actors at the intersection of human mobility and security. Specifically, they have forged bilateral and multilateral policy agreements and devolved many of their responsibilities for implementing immigration and human mobility policy to international, subnational and private sector actors. In pursuing this multifaceted course, the immigration policies of states have converged, and their burdens in managing their immigration-related responsibilities have been partially alleviated. But in doing so, the liberal norms inspiring their once steadfast commitments to maintaining relatively open borders and safeguarding citizen and immigrant rights have been compromised.
This chapter examines UK welfare reforms. The strategy of ‘quasi-markets’ in welfare was a New Labour innovation, and this chapter sets out why even intentionally ‘progressive’ neoliberal state reforms succumb to the flaws in neoclassical reasoning. The ‘choice and competition’ agenda was conceived in arguments about the relative benefits for ‘end-users’ of publicly funded but privately provided welfare services. As a closed-system argument about a marketplace, it thus wished away the actual terrain of education policy in which the state becomes the disempowered, and yet still responsible planner of outsourced educational enterprises, now governed through contract. The chapter investigates how quasi-market theory played out in the Academy Schools programme in England. It demonstrates why outsourcing complex welfare provision will tend create the worst of public and private regimes: the exploitation of incomplete contracts by producers, informational fragmentation, a loss of public accountability, financial corruption and increasingly Kafkaesque efforts at bureaucratic remedy, all reminiscent of Soviet enterprise planning failures.
This chapter applies the GVC framework in order to progress our understanding of the global TV system. Among the drivers that are changing the TV industry, three stand out: digitisation, consolidation, and vertical disintegration (also known as de-verticalisation). While the first two trends have long been identified as driving forces, the same cannot be said about the third. The phenomenon of segmentation is less known and associated with the formation of GVCs. The chapter expands on its prevalence in television and explain its role in globalising the industry. The final section provides an introductory outline of the TV GVC and its segments.
Singapore’s Progressive Wage Model, introduced in 2012 and mandatory in the cleaning industry since 2015, is a skills- and productivity-based approach to redesigning jobs and restructuring wages in the largely outsourced cleaning, security and landscaping sectors. Focusing on cleaning work in the food and beverage industry, this case study examines some early outcomes of this national drive to reduce wage inequality by improving the pay and conditions of commodified work in a sector subject to outsourcing-based cost competition. Based on interviews with cleaners, supervisors and managers, the findings suggest that in general, government and the trade union and employers’ association have worked together, to set wages and conditions transparently. Nevertheless, enforcement issues mean that cleaners remain vulnerable. They have limited information about their employment benefits and face various types of poor conditions, some sanctioned by and others in violation of labour laws. These vulnerabilities have structural roots, including rent imbalances and cheap sourcing, factors that commodify jobs. The implementation of the Progressive Wage Model may have helped de-commodify cleaning jobs for Singaporeans and permanent residents, but such outcomes are still dependent on non-systemic and unenforceable factors such as the kindness of individual supervisors. While a promising start has been made, Singapore’s initial efforts to improve incomes and conditions in low-wage work will nevertheless require stronger regulatory commitment.
Neoliberal policies of industrial relations decentralisation and privatisation have transformed the economic landscape of Australia in the last 20 years. The primary objective of these policies has been to enhance wealth and prosperity by improving productivity and flexibility of the workforce and competition and accountability in the market. Yet the evidence suggests that precarious workers are not benefiting from this increased prosperity, indeed they suffer by comparison with all other workers. Cleaners are a subset of precarious workers who have been hard hit by the dual impacts of labour market decentralisation and privatisation. This study finds quantitative evidence of an increasing gap in earnings between cleaners and other workers in Australia since the onset of workplace relations decentralisation and the proliferation of privatisation in the mid 1990s. We locate our argument in recent debates about the nature of variegated neoliberalism, the emergence of the networked economy, and the implications of these developments for the nature of work and employment.
New product development processes need to be compliant to regulatory requirements, and this chapter highlights the salient processes and quality systems to put into place to achieve success. Project management is made simple with specific tools provided here. Customer feedback is channeled into specific product characteristics, and the right tools are shown in this chapter. The biopharma industry has statistics showing less than 10% of starting compounds succeed in reaching market approval, and this chapter explains what causes these failures. The key issues that have repeatedly caused failure during device and diagnostic product development are also pointed out. Ethical decisions have to be made during product development as shown in this chapter. Outsourcing is a real option due to the availability of many contract research and manufacturing organizations, and judicious use of this option is discussed in this chapter. Key milestones that reduce risk and show transition from early stage to preclinical prototype stages are reviewed here. Does the popular concept of minimum viable product in software development apply in biomedicine prototyping? Other similar questions that help the reader understand pitfalls and best practices are answered here.
Preparing for scale-up in commercial manufacturing is far away from the thoughts of companies involved in product development, but this chapter shows when to start planning and how to plan a practical budget for this activity. For companies with their first product in commercial development, the build vs buy decision is never an easy one and the examples and key points for consideration simplify that process. The biggest challenge in scaling up is the gap in culture between R&D production for experimental testing in preclinical stages and the control and quality oriented culture in the manufacturing location. The case studies and content in the chapter specifically highlight how to achieve a successful technology transfer into commercial GMP manufacturing. The chapter content also gives practical guidelines on what it takes to put GMP and quality systems in place.
This chapter probes the borders of the public supervisory jurisdiction by looking at a parallel private law supervisory jurisdiction under which the courts judicially review decisions by "domestic tribunals". This comparative exercise gives pause for reflection on the deeper conceptual and normative foundations of judicial review, especially for questions of amenability to review. In the modern administrative state, many apparently "public" functions are performed by private, profit-oriented or charitable bodies and the review of these bodies has been an important testing ground in which theories of judicial review have been formulated and defended. Stopping short of suggesting a grand, unified theory of all the supervisory jurisdictions, I argue that an appreciation of the deep, structural parallels helps us to understand the common law roots of judicial review and that office could provide some intellectual resources to advance the province of administrative law judicial review in a principled fashion.
Comparative political economists often divide Latin American labor markets into those with secure employment (insiders) and those without it (outsiders). Yet this division misses an increasingly important class of contract workers, who hold formal labor contracts but often lack labor stability, welfare benefits, and organizing rights. When do unionized and contract workers share preferences and engage in joint organizing? And when do their efforts result in policy change? Drawing on case studies of Chile and Peru, I argue that unionized workers mobilize contract workers when they see their own membership under threat and when they share physical workplaces with contractors. Labor coalitions succeed in policy reform when they leverage divisions within the business community and upcoming elections to build support. This article thus pushes scholars to move beyond dichotomies of formal versus informal workers and study how contract workers matter for collective action and labor policy outcomes.
The marketisation of European home care has given rise to significant private for-profit providers growth. However, little research has focused directly on commercial companies to examine the mechanisms through which they emerge, grow and shape long-term care policy – this is this paper’s task. Drawing on the literature on business power, the recent concept of “institutional business power” is introduced, defined as the power flowing from the entrenched position of business actors in the provision of public social services. The paper identifies the mechanisms through which private providers have grown and assesses the extent of their institutional power by examining their influence on policy and the support they obtain from relevant home care stakeholders. The limits of providers’ institutional power are also discussed. The paper relies on semi-structured interviews with representatives of public, private and non-profit home care providers.
This chapter evaluates the unique obligations governments have when they commit citizen data to cloud service providers. In particular, the chapter focuses on how the responsibilities of governments are different than other types of cloud computing users focusing on specific procurement obligations, and other legal requirements.
The chapter also evaluates issues related to “data sovereignty”, outsourcing of government functions, and the potential risk to citizens from outsourcing critical infrastructure. Further, barriers that governments face when procuring cloud computing services including data localization restrictions, difficulties in comparing costs to traditional IT services, and ill-suited contract templates designed for traditional IT-outsourcing being applied to cloud computing services.
The chapter also explains that since operations or services are outsourced to cloud, governments must have the means to monitor them in order to retain a certain level of control over the operations they are outsourcing. The chapter examines government procurement programs in the United States, United Kingdom, and European initiatives to adopt cloud computing at the government level.
The relationship between corruption and privatization is a complex one. In some cases, they are conceived as polar opposites, with privatization touted as a strategy to combat corruption. In others, they are synonyms: privatization is perceived as a product of or a mechanism to enable corruption. In this chapter, I argue that there are particular circumstances in which each of these hypotheses may prevail, suggesting that the answer to the question “who gains from privatization?” is largely dependent on context. An accurate picture needs to consider the multiple phases of the privatization process, the unique institutional framework in which decisions are made, and the particularities of the sector(s) involved. To develop this argument, I organize the vast literature on the political economy of privatization according to three key moments: the decision to privatize (before privatization), the privatization process (during privatization), and the dynamics governing the privatized structures (after privatization).
Some goods and services seem to be fundamentally public, such as legislation, criminal punishment, and fighting wars. By contrast, other functions, such as garbage collection, do not. This volume brings together prominent scholars from a range of academic fields - including law, economics, philosophy, and sociology - to address the core question of what makes a certain good or service fundamentally public and why. Sometimes, governments and other public entities are superior because they are more likely to get at the right decisions or follow fair procedures. In other instances, the provision of goods and services by public entities is intrinsically valuable. By analyzing the these answers, the authors also explore the nature of the state and its authority. This handbook explores influential arguments for and against privatization and also develops a number of key studies explaining, justifying, or challenging the legitimacy and the desirability of public provision of particular goods and services.
Chapter 4 discusses the relationship between SORN laws and law enforcement. Since the inception of SORN laws, proponents of registration and notification have viewed them as tools for effective law enforcement. The significant financial costs to maintain and enforce these laws, however, may outweigh any usefulness they offer to law enforcement in terms of reducing sex offense victimization. The chapter first describes how states implement SORN laws. State and local law enforcement agencies are charged with the initial registration of covered individuals. Thereafter, these agencies monitor registrants and facilitate community notification. They conduct unannounced visits, maintain online registries, and inform community groups. These tasks impose substantial costs on the police, diverting resources from other criminal justice priorities. Many agencies form specialized units for SORN enforcement; others outsource aspects to private, for-profit companies. The chapter next analyzes how law enforcement personnel perceive SORN laws – in particular, their effectiveness. Studies show that individuals in law enforcement often doubt the efficacy of registration and notification, despite consistently supporting them. Law enforcement agents also recognize the costs SORN laws carry for their agencies and priorities. Ultimately, this chapter questions whether SORN laws are worth the costly burdens they impose on law enforcement.
A brief assessment of how artificial intelligence (AI) will change negotiation and the way in which we learn about it in the near future, and a note of optimism to conclude.