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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants and impacts of outsourcing pest and disease management on rice production in China.

A multinomial endogenous treatment effects model which accounts for selection bias was used.

The results show that outsourcing decisions are driven mainly by the size of the farm, the age of the household head and other household characteristics. Further, the authors find that outsourcing labor for pest and disease control has no significant effect on pest control cost and rice yields, though it reduces the number of pesticide applications. Conversely, outsourcing of professional services can increase rice yields by 4.1 percent, and at the same time it increases pest and disease control costs by 50.6 percent. However, it is found that outsourcing of professional services exerts no significant impact on the farm profitability.

This study suggests that households with large farm size are more likely to outsource professional services and, therefore, service providers and governments should target those farmers to provide incentives and create greater awareness of the benefits from the outsourcing of professional services. Moreover, the increase in yields along with the government subsidy justifies the outsourcing of professional services by farmers. However, service providers and policy makers have a lot of leeway to come up with cheaper methods for pest and disease management in rice production.

This study is the first attempt to simultaneously evaluate the determinants and impacts of outsourcing pest and disease management on rice production in China.

Previous studies focused on the influence of outsourcing (labor division) on productivity, especially in the industrial economy. However, few studies have focused on how labor division in agriculture affects agricultural productivity. To bridge this gap, this study uses survey data from 4864 farmer households in China to explore the impacts of outsourcing on agricultural productivity.

This study employs an endogenous switching regression to account for selection bias and a counterfactual framework to measure the degree of influence. Thus, this study analyzes determinants of outsourcing and the impacts of outsourcing on agricultural productivity under the same framework.

The results revealed the following. (1) Farmer households with the below average productivity tended to outsource; conversely, farmer households with the above average productivity tended to cultivate the land by themselves. (2) Productivity increased by 25.61% for farmer households who choose to outsource. Moreover, if nonoutsourcing farmer households would choose to outsource, their productivity would increase by 10.86%.

This study furthers one’s understanding of how outsourcing affects agricultural productivity among farmer households.

Rising production costs in coastal China have caused the popularity of the “China plus one” strategy, and the hike in oil prices favors near‐shore outsourcing to reduce transportation costs. Taking into consideration supply chain strategy, this paper aims to investigate the impacts of these major business environment changes on manufacturing outsourcing in China.

Considering costs and lead times, a bi‐objective integer programming model is developed to determine optimal supply chain configuration decisions under various business environment scenarios. A case study with a family of footwear products is used to illustrate model application and present detailed analyses.

Impacts of factors could be non‐intuitive. Partial relocation may be better than relocating all manufacturing steps to lower‐cost regions. Coastal China is still attractive for products with short order lead times, because of its formation of industrial clusters and efficient logistics services.

Only tangible factors including costs and lead times are evaluated; however, they offer valuable insight for the strategic decision of selecting outsourcing locations.

The analyses suggest differentiated outsourcing strategies depending on product and demand characteristics. The trend of moving manufacturing away from China is exaggerated. Coastal China has established industrial clusters and efficient logistics support to enable supply chain responsiveness; while inland China maintains a low cost comparable with competing Asian countries.

Existing studies on the research phenomenon focused on cost factors alone. This paper analyzes lead times as well. The study also introduces the network perspective into the research of offshore manufacturing outsourcing.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of organizational context on the relationships between outsourcing and manufacturing flexibility. In doing so, the authors study four types of manufacturing flexibility: product, mix, volume, and labor competence flexibility.

Based on transaction cost economics theory and resource-based view of competitive advantage, the authors focus on economies of scale and scope, asset specificity, organizational learning, and dynamic capabilities as contingencies affecting outsourcing-flexibility relationships. Combining theoretically developed propositions with insights from case studies of 11 manufacturing companies that outsourced some portion of their manufacturing, the authors derive grounded hypotheses.

Empirical results show that in some cases the effects of outsourcing on different types of manufacturing flexibility vary based upon some contingency factors.

Due to the qualitative nature and the geographical focus of the empirical examination, applicability of the findings to other contexts may be limited.

The authors point out specific contingencies that managers should consider when targeting manufacturing flexibility through outsourcing.

This paper presents the interrelationships among outsourcing of manufacturing activities, four types of manufacturing flexibilities, and theoretically derived contingencies. Based on evidence from the analyzed cases, the authors find indications that some contingencies moderate outsourcing-flexibility relationships. In addition, this paper introduces a new type of manufacturing flexibility: labor competence flexibility, which is defined as the ability of a company's workforce to deal with technology driven additions to and subtractions from products over time.

This paper examines the experiences of welfare clients on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Indian immigrant information technology (IT) workers on the H-1B visa to analyze how public–private collaborations in the spirit and practice of outsourcing, i.e. systematic fragmentation and decentralization of both corporate and state activities, function as mechanisms for disciplining labor. Through an analysis of these groups’ parallel experiences with exploitative work and employers in the U.S., this paper identifies how outsourcing is not merely a business model for cross-border trade, but also a key principle, component, and outcome of policy-based neo-liberal economic restructuring.

The nature of paid domestic work is changing, with the growth in companies delivering domestic cleaning services. Few studies have looked at why people opt to use these services and the underlying drivers. As with the outsourcing of non-core tasks in businesses, outsourcing domestic work is motivated by similar, yet different reasons, which have to do with the personal and private nature of domestic employment. This study aims to establish the reasons why “clients”, who were former employers of domestic servants, opted to outsource domestic work to a domestic cleaning service provider.

Given the limited research on domestic cleaning services in South Africa, a mixed-methods research approach is used.

The findings showed that there are three key motivations: the nature of the domestic cleaning service supplier, the services rendered by domestic workers and the tripartite employment relationships. These three benefits imply that clients have access to functional and numerical flexibility, unlike employing a domestic worker directly. This study contributes to the literature on outsourcing and domestic work by showing that clients not only look to change the economic structure of the relationship with domestic workers, but it allows them to psychologically and emotionally distance themselves from domestic workers.

This study shows that some people are no longer willing to have a relationship with the people who clean their homes, and that they believe it is simply not worth the effort to maintain a relationship. This is an aspect that needs further research, as this is the one sphere where women are united in their plight, albeit from different worldviews. Thus, a limitation is that this study only focuses on clients' views of outsourcing. Have domestic workers employed by the outsourced domestic cleaning service supplier become just like assembly-line workers, where they are anonymous to their clients, performing routine tasks with little recognition from those whose homes they are servicing? Future studies could focus on domestic workers' views on outsourcing and the effects it has on their working conditions and employment relations.

Firstly, studies mainly focus on the Global North where domestic work and outsourcing have different dynamics, regulation policies and social changes when compared to South Africa. Secondly, few studies have sought to establish why people shift from employing a domestic or care worker directly to an outsourced domestic agency when direct domestic help is available and affordable. Considering these shortcomings, this study aims to provide a better understanding of domestic cleaning service suppliers from the perspective of clients, often omitted from the literature. Accordingly, this study aimed to establish what the benefits are for clients (former employers of domestic workers) who use domestic cleaning service suppliers.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of recent developments in employment relations in Chile, focusing on recent episodes of contract labour mobilisation in the forestry and copper mining sectors.

This paper is based on a consolidation of existing evidence from a range of primary, secondary and tertiary sources.

The paper demonstrates the inadequacy of Chile's employment relations institutions to protect vulnerable workers and shows the capacity of contract workers to overcome such limitations by recurring to mobilisation. It argues that contract labour mobilisation rather than a shift left in government seems to offer a more plausible explanation of current developments in Chilean employment relations.

The paper identifies salient issues but further research is necessary to understand the actual social processes of collective action involved in recent episodes of contract labour mobilisation.

This information could contribute to better policy making, better management of the employment relationship, and informing the revitalisation of labour movements.

There are few studies on contract workers' collective action particularly in developing countries, and a contribution is made to critical debates on the sustainability of Chile's neoliberal socio‐economic and employment relations system.

The paper aims to investigate the difference in total factor productivity (TFP) among those firms with and without outsourcing in a developing country like Vietnam. Also, it explores the effect of outsourcing activities on total factor productivity with a specified concentration on the Vietnamese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The panel data set of SMEs used in this study was originated from biannual surveys conducted under the collaboration between educational organizations and government agencies: Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), Department of Economics – the University of Copenhagen, the Institution of Labor Studies and Social Affairs (ILSSA) in the Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA). In this study, the model is developed based on the production function in accordance with the model of Girma and Görg (2004). The firms’ TFP is the difference between the actual and the predicted output as with the approach by Levinsohn and Petrin (2003).

This study finds out that firms with outsourcing have higher total factor productivity than those without outsourcing activities. In addition, the more firms spend on outsourcing, the higher total factor productivity they can gain. Outsourcing to SMEs in a developing country can significantly increase its TFP by means of either maintaining core competencies or searching external resources in conducting some internal activities.

Although outsourcing has been widely applied by large firms, the research studying its impact on productivity at firm level is limited. Especially, this study can shed light on the impact for the case of SMEs in a developing economy.

This study aims to hypothesize that the more in-house staff perceive themselves as beneficiaries of the procedural justice (PJ) followed in the outsourcing, or perceive their outsourced peers as recipients of distributive (DJ) and interactional justice (IJ), the more they will show acceptance and positive evaluations of the outsourcing initiatives. Although prior research in the hospitality industry has extensively studied individual-level reactions to organizational justice, no study has been undertaken to examine how hotel staff support and value outsourcing initiatives based on the way they perceive management’s treatment of them and their peers.

Questionnaire data from 215 in-house employees working side-by-side with outsourced employees at 14 hotels in Gran Canaria (Spain) were analyzed by using structural equation modeling.

The results found that in-house employees who perceived themselves or their outsourced peers as recipients of organizational justice to a greater extent reported greater support for outsourcing by expressing higher levels of acceptance and better evaluations. The results also supported procedural justice (PJ) as playing a dominant role over distributive (DJ) and interactional justice (IJ).

The findings suggest that by encouraging justice perceptions among in-house employees, mainly those related to properly discussing the outsourcing procedures with affected employees, hotel managers can promote successful outsourcing. Given that in-house employees reacted not only to the way they were treated by hotel management but also to the way their outsourced peers were treated, the findings also indicate that all (un)fair treatment in outsourcing, regardless of the recipient, should receive explicit attention by hotel managers.

This paper is one of the first to primarily focus on the individual level of analysis in examining and supporting organizational justice in hotel firms as a factor influencing outsourcing success.