Article Report - Globalization of the ICT labour force

This week’s reading was the chapter “Globalization of the ICT labour force” by William Lazonick taken from The Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies. This chapter focused on the development of offshoring within the technology sector from a domestic to a global vantage point. What was once considered a way to lower the cost of employees performing low skilled jobs, offshoring turned into global phenomenon that produced high- skilled, high-paying jobs. The battle between nations, spearheaded by the United States, lead to the highest educated scientists and engineers to cause a ‘brain drain’ in their home country by immigrating and working in the United States. This ‘brain drain’ led to a loss of jobs in developing nations as well as depleting developing economies by sucking its brainpower from them and instilling it into an already thriving economy.

As the chapter progressed, the indirect benefits of offshoring surfaced. As countries began to brainstorm ideas on how to not lose their highly skilled citizens to America, investments in research and development and specialized education systems began to pop up all over the world, specifically in East Asia (China, India, Malaysia, South Korea, Japan). Within each of these countries, specialized schools for the sciences and engineering became more popular. Additionally, these schools offered incentives – from the school itself or from the government – that attracted not only the highly skilled people from their own county, but from other countries as well. Incentives and compensation packages included, but are not limited to, free housing, relocation expenses and exemption from military service. This helped reverse the ‘brain drain’ and led to a new ‘brain gain,’ which brought highly educated people back to their homeland to work. As education around the globe started to produce more educational degrees, other countries felt the pressure to ramp up their educational system so they did not fall behind. By the 1990s into the 2000s, the United States faced a 180-degree swing and began setting up headquarters in foreign countries because they were more skilled than American workers and even paid foreign workers to come to America to train Americans.

The author, William Lazonick, is extremely qualified to comment on the subject of information and communication technology. He specializes on the social conditions of innovation and economic development in advanced and emerging economics. He earned a PhD in economics from Harvard, has been a professor at Harvard and Columbia, and is currently a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.  Additionally, he is the co-founder and president of the Academic-Industry Research Network. As for his other pieces of work, Lazonick has won multiple awards including an award from the Harvard Business School for his article “Innovative Business Models and Varieties of Capitalism” in 2010. Furthermore, his book “Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy? Business Organization and High-Tech Employment in the United States” was awarded the Schumpeter Prize in 2010 and is currently working on a new book titled “The Theory of Innovative Enterprise.”