ABSTRACT
The increasing prominence of outsourcing across both the private and public sectors of many countries has led to the concept receiving a significant amount of attention from both academia and practitioners. Outsourcing has progressed from focusing initially on areas such as information technology services and facilities management to encompassing almost every organizational function (Barthelemy, 2003). Its growth has further been accelerated by rapidly developing product and service markets, both locally and offshore (McIvor, 2005). It has also become an extremely political issue in the developed economies of the world as organizations increasingly outsource many production-and service-related activities to developing economies in order to take advantage of lower labour rates and more favourable employment legislation. In addition, many governments in developed economies have been employing outsourcing as a means of reducing the scale of large public-sector organizations and accessing the capabilities of product and service providers in the private sector.
