ABSTRACT
Over the past decades, Japanese manufacturing firms have enthusiastically embraced outsourcing and offshoring as ways to improve business performance. This chapter examines the service offshoring practices of Japanese firms in Bangkok, with a focus on contact services. It explores the strategies and motives of the Japanese contact centre firms involved, looks into the motives of the Japanese workers filling the cubicles, and reflects upon its possible wider implications. The chapter further describes the early experiences of Japanese firms in outsourcing and offshoring contact services. The relations between the Japanese contact services centres and their Bangkok/ Thai environment are thin. The contact centres are basically Japanese owned and managed operations, employing Japanese labour, servicing the Japanese domestic contact services market. The chapter shows that for the Japanese, the concept of moving both work and people to a lower-cost but yet agreeable overseas location like Bangkok seems to work well.
