On February 14, 2005, the New Yorker published an article with the remarkable title “Outsourcing torture: the secret history of America's ‘extraordinary rendition’ program.” In the article it was argued that the US government deliberately chose to leave the questioning of its terror suspects to other countries like Syria, in order to evade the limitations posed by US human rights laws. These other countries are believed to be less stringent regarding torture and hence, by outsourcing, the US government could obtain more information (a “better product” in a sense). Outsourcing, a word unheard of just twenty years ago, has clearly gained entry into the vocabulary of ordinary people. In the business world such pervasiveness is already taken for granted. A simple search of the Financial Times / Business.com website generated 10,506 published articles during the year 2005 alone. It is hard to find managers who do not have an opinion of outsourcing and even harder to find an individual who is completely unaware of it.

People all across the world are today feeling the impact of outsourcing. Consumers in the United States increasingly deal with suppliers of the firms who sell them products and services, rather than with the firms themselves, for instance when they call service centers. Managers in Germany are faced with tough decisions about whether to restructure their firms by outsourcing more manufacturing and services activities, often to low-wage countries.