Offshoring: Cross-Cultural Strategies from the Offshore Provider’s Perspective

Global sourcing is characterised by the migration of knowledge-intensive as well as routine IT-enabled tasks from large industrialized countries to lower wage, highly productive, labour-intensive locations (Carmel and Tjia, 2005; Willcocks and Lacity, 2006). This phenomenon raises a variety of issues affecting client-supplier interactions which have attracted interest in the research community, although that interest dominantly focuses on the client’s perspective and on relationships with large, multinational Indian firms. Recently, however, China has been identified as the next major competitor for a share of the offshored services market and is actively implementing strategies to develop this sector, including the development of technology parks targeting offshore software and services providers (Qu and Brocklehurst, 2003).