Treasury Secretary John Snow fueled current controversy over U.S. companies sending jobs overseas this week, testifying that employee outsourcing benefits the American economy. At Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, students are addressing the issue as part of the M.B.A. program, and faculty are working with the Hopkins Center to bring a production on outsourcing to campus next week.
"In today's world, outsourcing is a major issue, a major question, a major opportunity -- but also a major concern," said John Owens, executive director of the Center for International Business at Tuck.
But Owens said outsourcing is "nothing new" and has been addressed in Tuck's curriculum for years.
"Outsourcing is not something that occurred this year. It has become a hot political topic primarily because we have a presidential election," Owens said, citing examples of machine weaving in the 1800s and today's India-based call centers for U.S. computer companies, which have been objects of contention for nearly five years.
Tuck students address outsourcing from an academic perspective, studying how it affects various economies as well as particular companies or industries, and also from a practitioner's perspective through case studies and consulting programs.
The Tuck Global Consultancy, for example, teams up second-year M.B.A. students with consulting projects for real-world companies overseas. Recently outsourcing has emerged as a major issue for several of these organizations. Last year, three projects students worked on in Asia involved outsourcing as a major component, Owens said.
Outside of the classroom, Tuck faculty and the Hop are bringing outsourcing to center stage next week, literally, at the Moore Theater, with a production of the play "Alladeen," about workers in an Indian call center, and an accompanying panel discussion on outsourcing issues from various perspectives.
"In the business school world, outsourcing is probably one of the biggest topics these days. It seemed appropriate that we should be thinking about this," said M. Eric Johnson, the director of the Glassmeyer/McNamee Center for Digital Strategies , which is organizing the event.
"Today, I think it's a big issue for a couple of reasons. We're outsourcing white collar work around the world, and that's happening at a time when the U.S. economy is not doing quite so well," Johnson said.
The Center for Digital Strategies studies the information technology needs of large multinational companies and is now addressing outsourcing, as many corporate officials are using the practice to save money by hiring less expensive IT workers overseas.
"Alladeen" is a play about those workers. According to Johnson, the production is about an Indian call center and "how the employees of this call center in India learn American culture and become kind of cultural Americans ... this whole kind of notion of being an immigrant of the Internet."
