ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with foreign direct investment (FDI) related to service offshoring and outsourcing and its implications for host economies. It seeks to address the aforementioned issues, and in doing so to extend the geographical coverage of the service offshoring literature, via an exploratory case study investigation of offshore service-related FDI in Northern Ireland - a lagging old industrial region in the periphery of the UK and Western Europe. The chapter reviews relevant prior literature on service offshoring and regional development and develops an analytical framework to guide the empirical analysis of the case. It explains the Profile Northern Ireland's inward-investment performance since the mid-1990s and charts the rise of services projects. The chapter also examines some of the employment impacts of service projects on the region. It focuses on existing portrayals of service offshoring by identifying and delimiting some specific geographical and organisational configurations from the host economy's perspective.
