Meaning of outsourcing evolves ? and about debt collection ?
Until what I think is fairly recently, the word "outsourcing" meant
that Company A hires Company B to do some jobs that used to be done
in-house, which usually meant some jobs were cut at Company A.
However, in recent weeks, as political pressure in the U.S. has
mounted regarding companies hiring people in other countries to do
desk jobs that had previously been done by U.S. employees, the meaning
of "outsourcing" seems to have been shifting in some contexts to refer
to this practice instead, even when the offshore jobs were regular
employment at our Company A rather than being jobs at Company B
instead. I've seen this in political commentary in major newspapers,
and even AUE's John Dean used "outsourcing" in this sense on March 24
of this year.
My perception of how this has happened is that it went something like
this: some of the offshore hiring was in fact outsourcing in the
traditional sense, and business columns in newspapers referred to this
as "offshore outsourcing" while referring to the general practice of
hiring abroad as "offshoring" or "offshore hiring"; but then the
politics reporters and columnists, always happy to pick up on a new
buzzword (and having possibly forgotten about the other meaning of
"outsourcing"?), started dropping the word "offshore" and using
"outsourcing" instead; then readers who hadn't much been exposed to
the word "outsourcing" started using it solely in the new sense. I
could be mistaken about this progression, but this was how it seemed
to me to be happening in the past few months.
I've been trying in my own tiny way to encourage the use of
"offshoring" (which I've seen in the Washington Post and NY Times,
among other places) in cases where people absolutely insist on having
a single word to refer to moving jobs offshore, because I don't much
like the idea of "outsourcing" having two meanings that don't
necessarily overlap, but I have a feeling this'll be another of those
squirtgun-vs.-raging-inferno things.
-There must be a lot of Company A folks over at the offices in Bangalore
(The Tysons Corner of India) who are disenfranchised with
this practice (or practise, I suppose they'd write).
Freck, even I engaged in this looser use of "outsourcing" i