Shoring up company profits?

Offshoring (which has already made it into the dictionary) is the practice of basing some of a company's processes or services overseas (offshore), so as to take advantage of lower costs. So a UK company might locate a call centre in India rather than Manchester or a US organization might transfer its manufacturing facility to China.

Offshoring has become so widespread that the term has begun to generate a whole 'family' of related words which feature '-shoring' as a second element. Whether they will have the same staying power as their parent term probably depends on how successful they are as cost-saving strategies.

• nearshoring: the location of some of a company's processes to a nearby foreign country (e.g. Canada for a US company, Poland for a German one) rather than a more distant one.
• farshoring: the opposite of the above - that is, offshoring of some operations to a distant foreign country.
• rightshoring: the process of selecting the most appropriate and efficient combination of nearshoring, farshoring, inshoring, etc. for the specific operations or processes involved. This practice is also known as bestshoring: perhaps inevitably, worstshoring has also appeared.
• inshoring: following the more traditional course of keeping a company's operations within its home country.
• sameshoring: offshoring to a country with a similar cultural background (for example, offshoring UK operations to New Zealand)
• homeshoring: using staff based in their homes rather than on company premises, typically to handle customer support and similar work.

But what of the staff involved in offshoring operations? Because of the nature of the work, some have been described as cyber coolies, as this extract from the Observer (31 October 2005) indicates:

Rawat, 26...has a managerial position as a 'team fraud coordinator'. According to a study into conditions inside call centres conducted by a government-funded research institute, she is a prime example of an Indian 'cyber coolie' - an expensively educated, highly intelligent graduate, who is wasting her talents performing exhausting, mindlessly repetitive tasks for the call centre industry.

Coolies were unskilled manual labourers in South Asia and China; the term cyber coolie therefore implies that global organizations tend to offload relatively menial IT and call-centre work (taking place in cyberspace) to people in less developed countries.

Finally, staff who use computers or telecommunications in any location or organization may be subject to dataveillance. The term, a blend of data and surveillance, refers to the use of software to monitor a person's life and activities.

In terms of work, this usually entails a company logging the amount of time employees spend away from a workstation, surfing the Net, calling or emailing friends, etc. So if you happen to be reading this instead of keeping your nose to the grindstone, stop right now: Big Brother could be watching you!

Printer friendly version