This book provides in-depth insights into the practices that lead to success in outsourcing global services. Written by internationally acclaimed academics, it covers best practices on IT outsourcing, business process outsourcing and netsourcing. This book is a must read for any practitioner, academic or student concerned with global sourcing.

The Outsourcing Enterprise

by L Willcocks, S. Cullen, and A Craig

Published 14 October 2010
Evidence shows that organizations with both a CEO and a team involved in sourcing strategy and supplier configuration make more effective decisions. If the wrong supplier is chosen, performance can be negatively affected. Here the authors look at how companies can improve their outsourcing capabilities.

Since 2007, South Africa has been one of the world's upcoming Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) offshore destinations. This book is based on the authors' most recent research into high performance BPO globally and new research streams specifically on South Africa.


The central concepts of information meaning, embodied cognition and semiotics are hugely relevant to contemporary organisations and personal and social lives. However, these concepts are not well understood and are frequently under-represented, misrepresented, and their importance seriously underplayed in the study of management. This is particularly noticeable in the study of the information systems and digital technologies that underpin so much of business operations, personal and social life, organisation, communication and management today.

This book seeks to fill the obvious gap. It provides detailed understanding of fundamental concepts and develops a useable, integrative semiotics framework. The framework is grounded in rich social theory and philosophy, and, as the book demonstrates, provides a valuable exploratory and explanatory framework for researchers. This takes shape as a 12-step research process, that has the general features of most research methodologies but also provides distinctive rich resources for in-depth research into semiotically related phenomena. It will be of great interest to academics undertaking research in digital technologies and business model innovation, as well as scholars of research methodology, organisation studies, HRM, marketing and information systems.