ABSTRACT
This introduction chapter presents an overview of the book and also presents the key concepts discussed in the the subsequent chapters. The book concerns the local impact of services offshoring in the economies where the work lands, with a focus on South and Southeast Asia: the part of the world that attracts most of the services offshored. The services offshoring, as the process is called, has gained substantial momentum since it surfaced in the 1990s. The IT-enabled unbundling of service production processes allows for such processes to be outsourced and/or offshored. While outsourcing refers to the migration of production activities across a firm's organizational boundaries, offshoring concerns the relocation of activities overseas. Offshoring may or may not involve outsourcing. The offshoring is often referred to as offshore outsourcing, the outsourcing as captive offshoring. Since its inception, services offshoring has become an increasingly complex phenomenon. Initially, work mainly flowed from the global north to the global south.
