The Impact of Impact Sourcing: Framing a Research Agenda

Impact sourcing is an emerging phenomenon that aims to transform people’s lives, families, and communities through meaningful employment in the Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) or Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sectors (Lacity et al. 2012). The Rockefeller Foundation has been the leading global institution promoting impact sourcing through its Digital Jobs Africa Initiative. The Rockefeller Foundation supported two key reports by The Monitor Group (2011) and Avasant (2012). In The Monitor Group/Rockefeller Foundation (2011), impact sourcing is defined as “employing people at the bottom of the base of the pyramid, with limited opportunity for sustainable employment, as principal workers in business process outsourcing (BPO) centers to provide high-quality, information-based services to domestic and international clients” (p. 2). In addition to the Rockefeller Foundation, The Monitor Group, and Avasant, a number of organizations, like the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP 2009) and National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) foundation,1 and scholars have begun to examine impact sourcing (Heeks 2012ab; Lacity et al. 2012) and its related concepts, ethical sourcing (Heeks 2012a), sustainable global outsourcing (Babin and Nicholson 2009; 2012), microwork (Gino and Staats 2012), corporate social responsibility (CSR) in outsourcing (Babin 2008), social outsourcing (Heeks and Arun 2010), and rural sourcing (Lacity et al. 2011).