Date of Award

2013

Document Type

Honors Thesis

Department

School of Business

First Advisor

Annetta Gibson

Abstract

Offshoring has become an integral aspect of many American businesses. Companies may choose to sent some or all of thier manufacturing and service-related jobs to other countries for a variety of reasons. These reasons may be financial (e.g. lower labor costs abroad) or strategic (e.g. a desire to keep core competencies within the U.S., while sending other jobs abroad). Tariffs, quotas, and local content requirments placed on companies may also influence these decisions. A relatively recent trend has been the return of some of these offshored jobs to the U.S. In this project, I refer to this trend as "reshoring." Despite companies' original reasons to offshore, some find they have equally good reasons to reshore jobs. These reasons may be economic (e.g. an increase in minimum wages abroad), strategic (e.g. ability to advertise as 'Made in America'), operational (e.g. shorter lead times), cultural (e.g. differences between host country and home country management styles), ethical (e.g. host country corruption), etc. This research project attempts to discover if factors like these have influenced the hiring decisions of specific companies in the Upper-Midwestern portion of the U.S. as well, or if they have worked through an entirely different decision framework.

Subject Area

Offshore outsourcing, Contracting out.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.32597/honors/70/

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