Browsing by Subject "Outsourcing"
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Item 1-800 worlds : embodiment and experience in the Indian call center economy(2010-08) Krishnamurthy, Mathangi Kasi; Hartigan, John, 1964-; Visweswaran, Kamala; Brow, James; Stewart, Kathleen; Abraham, Itty; Flores, RichardThis dissertation is concerned with the everyday lives of transnational Indian call center workers when situated within the global politics of voice-based outsourcing. The call center economy gained impetus in early 2000-2001, when multinational corporations began to train young men and women in India to mask their spatial and temporal location, in order that they could serve customers in the US and the UK. Taking calls through the night to serve the work day of Western consumers, these customer service agents were asked to assume a different name, location, and cultural and language markers, as part of the requirements of work. I explore the ways in which these young, middle-class workers located themselves within practices, contentious representations, and material outcomes of this transnational outsourcing economy. Through ethnographic research in Pune, a prominent university town and call center hub in western India, I investigate (1) everyday life in and out of the call center, (2) labor management practices within call centers, and (3) the socio-economic and cultural transformations that accompanied and framed the development of the urban Indian call center economy. This research engages with the machinations of multinational corporations as they incorporate large number of labor forces worldwide into transnational work. It builds on three main bodies of theory - flexible or late capital and flexibility, the South Asian postcolonial nation-state, and affective labor. Through these, I provide a thick description of the history, construction, maintenance and disruption of this site, as also the ways in which this particular story of capital was stabilized. I engage with questions such as, what complex negotiations underlie the ostensible success of new service economies in India? What are its cultural, political and economic determinants and ramifications? What grounds are the claims of state, capital and culture being contested or reified upon, and what do such negotiations mean for service workers within the landscape of urban India? This dissertation shows how the practice of everyday life in this transnational milieu is best explained as the collusion and tension between the contested socio-economic spaces of the new Indian middle-classes and middle-class-ness, and an ungrounded discourse of mobile and flexible capital. The stories of call center workers in this analysis are the stories of particular subjects called upon and striving to be constantly flexible in order to successfully become middle-class and global in the same breath, one often seamlessly overlapping the other.Item Contract manufacturing(2010-12) Patel, Sitansh Rajnikant; Lewis, Kyle, 1961-; Darwin, Thomas J.By surveying literature on the topics of contract manufacturing, this report describes how organizations can make use of contract manufacturing to enhance their profitability and competitiveness. This paper is intended to serve as a guide for organization executives, managers, and team members who are exploring contract manufacturing. It is a how-to manual, and addresses various issues involved in the contract manufacturing, and suggests a methodology for addressing them. Finally, the report briefly describes the perceived benefits of contract manufacturing, but lack of understanding of the total costs involved in executing this initiative may adversely affect many organizations. Thus, the question arises how company decides if contract manufacturing is the right decision, and if yes, then how they perform it effectively and efficiently?Item Essays in applied microeconomics(2021-04-20) Park, Jiwon; Linden, Leigh L., 1975-; Trejo, Stephen J.; Murphy, Richard; Fabregas, RaissaThe first chapter examines whether funding for public schools affects parents' decision to send their children to private schools in the US. In the wake of the Great Recession, funding for public K-12 education fell precipitously and stayed low for several years. Exploiting the fact that states with greater reliance on state appropriations and states with no income tax experienced larger cuts, I instrument for local public school funding. I find that students exposed to a $1,000 (9.0 percent) decrease in per-pupil funding are more likely to enroll in private schools by 0.48 to 0.59 percentage points (4.5 to 5.6 percent). I show further that the effect is strongest among high socioeconomic status students living in disadvantaged areas. These findings suggest that reductions in public school resources lead to greater inequality in education and negatively change student composition in public schools through school choice. In the second chapter, I investigate the effect of Facility-Based Childbirth Policy (FBCP) to promote facility-based child delivery (FBD) and prenatal care in Rwanda. To identify the causal effect on childhood mortality rates, I utilize the geographical variation of FBD in the baseline period and the timing of the policy in a difference-in-difference framework. The reform has a substantial effect on infant (under one year) and child (under five years) mortality, with reductions of 12 and 25 deaths per 1,000 live births, respectively. However, the overall reduction in newborn (seven days) neonatal (30 days) mortality is not statistically significant despite a large increase in FBD. I also show that other policy interventions like performance-based financing schemes can strengthen the treatment effect on newborn and neonatal mortality, implying the importance of multiple approaches to reduce mortality rates. The third chapter explores whether the increase in service outsourcing to India has reduced the employment of the occupations with greater exposure to Indian service imports. To account for endogeneity, I instrument for the growth of the US's service import from India, exploiting the change in Indian import in European countries. The occupation-level analysis produces a mixed result. An increase in service imports reduces the total employment from 2000 to 2006; however, the effect attenuates in the later period of 2006 to 2016. The change is skill-biased: the reduction in employment is smaller for college-educated workers in the first period, and the sign reverses later.Item Factors affecting the cost of engineering for transportation projects(2009-12) Singh, Prakash, 1983-; O'Brien, William J.; Persad, Khali R.State DOTs (department of transportation) spend billions of dollars on construction and maintenance of transportation projects every year. In addition, significant sums go to preliminary and construction engineering (PE and CE). For many projects, DOTs utilize engineering services from consultants, to supplement in-house engineering. The cost and quality of consultant’s engineering services compared to in-house, are important issues to justify the involvement of consultants. This report provides an analysis of those issues on Texas Department of Transportation (TXDOT) projects. Traditionally, the costs of PE and CE are calculated as a fixed percentage of total project construction cost, and the efficiency of engineering organizations is assessed by comparison of their gross percentages. However, the results presented here show that project scope and complexity are significant factors in PE and CE cost. Therefore, simplistic comparisons of PE and CE percentages can be misleading when applied across a mixed program of projects.Item The hidden costs of IT offshoring(2010-05) Solitro, Stephen Philip; Ambler, Tony; Newburger, MannyIn this paper, I will explore the hidden costs and risks of IT offshoring and how to manage those costs so that realistic expectations can be set. Establishing a baseline of such expectations will help companies understand and follow best practices in planning, executing, and managing the full offshore lifecycle. While details will vary with each project, offshore vendor, and company, these costs are seen across most offshore ventures and, if understood, will help explain why so many offshoring attempts fail, help IT managers and decision makers anticipate potential problems, and help CIOs more accurately predict cost savings.Item The role of the Western engineer in the emerging Asian multinational corporation(2010-12) Tomazin, Thomas Joseph; Lewis, Kyle, 1961-; Darwin, TommyIn recent years there has been a growing trend of Western companies outsourcing many engineering jobs to Taiwan, India, and China. While companies have been outsourcing and moving manufacturing jobs for decades, there is a recent acceleration of sending “high tech” engineering jobs overseas. While the job loss in the Western world is alarming to Western engineers, there is another trend that is keeping jobs in the West that deserves some consideration. Asian multinational corporations are acquiring engineering operations in the United States and Europe. Since there is seemingly abundant talent available in their home countries, what motivates these Asian multinational corporations to invest in Western engineering operations? Is this investment a long term viable employment option for Western engineers? This paper will address these two critical questions.Item Theory and practice of firewall outsourcing(2020-03-26) Reaz, Rezwana; Gouda, Mohamed G., 1947-; Mok, Aloysius K; Qiu, Lili; Acharya, Hrishikesh BA firewall system is a packet filter that is placed at the entry point of an enterprise network in the Internet. Packets that attempt to enter the enterprise network through this entry point are examined, one by one, against the rules of some underlying firewall F of the firewall system. Each rule in F has a decision which is either “accept” or “reject”. For any incoming packet p, the firewall system identifies the first rule (in the sequence of rules in F) that matches p. If the decision of this rule is “accept”, then the firewall system forwards p to the enterprise network. Otherwise the decision of this rule is “reject” and packet p is discarded and prevented from entering the network. Each firewall system consists of two units: a rule matching unit and a decision unit. Both units are usually executed in the firewall system. To simplify the task of managing the firewall system, we identify a special class of firewall systems, called the outsourced system, where the rule matching unit is executed in a public cloud. Unfortunately, public clouds are usually unreliable and execution of the rule matching unit in a public cloud can be vulnerable to two types of attacks: verifiability attacks and privacy attacks. The main objective of this dissertation is to discuss how to execute the rule matching unit of an outsourced system in a public cloud such that verifiability and privacy attacks are prevented from occurring. The main contribution of this dissertation is three-fold. First, we discuss how to design outsourced firewall system such that execution of the designed system in the public clouds prevents the occurrence of verifiability and privacy attacks. The resulting system, called the private system, make use of two public clouds. We show that this private system prevents verifiability and privacy attacks under the assumption that the two public clouds used in this system are both “sensible” and “non-colluding”. Second, we identify a special class of firewalls, called the partially specified firewall, where a firewall is called partially specified when the decisions of some of the rules in the firewall are not specified as “accept” or “reject”. We show that for every partially specified firewall PF, there is a (fully specified) firewall F such that PF and F are equivalent. We discuss how to design an outsourced system whose underlying firewall is a partially specified firewall PF such that the designed system prevents both verifiability and privacy attacks. We achieve this outsourced system by obtaining an equivalent firewall F from PF and designing a private system for F. Third, we present a generalization of firewalls called firewall expressions. A firewall expression is specified using one or more component firewalls and three firewall operators: “not”, “and”, and “or”. For example, the firewall expression (G and H) consists of two component firewalls G and H and one firewall operator “and”. This firewall expression accepts a packet p iff both firewalls G and H accept p. For any underlying firewall expression FE, we define an Expression System as a generalization of firewall systems that takes as input any packet p and determines whether the underlying firewall expression FE accepts or rejects packet p. We design an outsourced expression system for any underlying firewall expression FE. We achieve this outsourced expression system by using a private system for each component firewall of FE and combining these private systems through an overall decision unit to determine whether any packet is accepted or rejected according to the firewall expression FE