Insourcing Americans Jobs: Business Leaders Meet with President Obama (2012), http://thefilmarchive.org/
January 11, 2012
Insourcing is the opposite of outsourcing; that is insourcing (or contracting in) is often defined as the delegation of operations or jobs from production within a business to an internal (but ‘stand-alone’) entity that specializes in that operation. Insourcing is a business decision that is often made to maintain control of critical production or competencies. An alternate use of the term implies transferring jobs to within the country where the term is used, either by hiring local subcontractors or building a facility.
Insourcing is widely used in an area such as production to reduce costs of taxes, labor, transportation, etc.
The Organization for International Investment (OFII), a Washington, D.C. trade association, defines insourcing as “companies abroad investing in the United States and creating jobs for Americans.” OFII advocates for fair, non discrimnatory treatment of foreign-based companies and increased foreign direct investment (FDI) as well as the importance of global investment to the United States’ “insourcing” story. Currently there are more than 5 million Americans working for the U.S. operations of global companies.
Insourcing has also been described as a domestic company’s decision to bring jobs back to America from overseas or “onshoring.” It has also been called “reshoring.” Onshoring is a company’s decision to stop outsourcing, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, which is the official “business and economics research arm” of McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm. The Boston Consulting Group has shown that there is a trend towards inshoring.
To those who are concerned that nations may be losing a net amount of jobs due to outsourcing, some point out that insourcing also occurs. According to a study by Mary Amiti and Shang-Jin Wei, in the United States, the United Kingdom, and many other industrialized countries more jobs are insourced than outsourced. They found that out of all the countries in the world they studied, the U.S. and the U.K. actually have the largest net trade surpluses in business services. Countries with a net deficit in business services include Indonesia, Germany and Ireland.
Insourcing may be done by “onshoring”. Insourcing delegates certain work to a different company, which may come from a different country in the case of onshoring.
Researchers take note: These terms may evolve. The prefixes to “-sourcing” and “-shoring” remain in flux: Outsourcing gave rise to the term in-sourcing, and offshoring resulted in on-shoring. However, onshoring is sometimes called in-shoring. Insourcing are also sometimes known as backsourcing. In time, the McKinsey Global Institute’s description of releasing offshore ties to keep jobs at home may become simply onshoring, while attracting foreign direct investment into a company’s home country may become inshoring of such FDI. For now, any research into insourcing should include searches into its subsets of onshoring and inshoring, which some still use interchangeably.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insourcing,
