Outsourcing: A Case of Shared Mental Models in Conflict

SUMMARY For more than two decades, outsourcing – the business practice of transferring jobs, knowledge, and technologies from high‐ to low‐cost countries – has been a leading public policy issue in the U.S. and other economies. Policymakers respond to public concerns over outsourcing in two ways. On...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Kyklos (Basel) 2020-08, Vol.73 (3), p.410-435
Main Author: Hira, Ron
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Elections
Elites
Ideology
Mental models
Outsourcing
Policy making
Politics
Public interest
Public policy
Uncertainty
Voters
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:SUMMARY For more than two decades, outsourcing – the business practice of transferring jobs, knowledge, and technologies from high‐ to low‐cost countries – has been a leading public policy issue in the U.S. and other economies. Policymakers respond to public concerns over outsourcing in two ways. One, they craft an electoral message to attract voters, and two, they choose policy responses. Two competing ideologies have emerged, one shared by elites and the other the public, to describe outsourcing and formulate policy solutions. This paper applies the Shared Mental Models (SMM) framework developed by Denzau and North to the two ideologies and it describes how each ideology shapes the politics and policies of outsourcing. Outsourcing is the kind of difficult collective choice – highly complex with strong uncertainty, limited information feedback, and mixed motivations ‐ well suited for the SMM framework. The framework provides a novel view into the political and policy dynamics of outsourcing.
ISSN:0023-5962
1467-6435
DOI:10.1111/kykl.12242