insourcing

[Victor Steinbok]

Is the Obama campaign repurposing "insourcing" to communicate a new
meaning? Or are they simply being obliquitous in communicating the
established meaning?

There are two meanings in the OED:

1. The action or process of obtaining goods or services in-house, esp.
by using existing resources or employees. Cf. outsourcing n.
2. Chiefly U.S. The action of undertaking work outsourced by another
(esp. foreign) company.

The first applies to a single enterprise, the second suggests bringing
jobs /into/ the country.

The campaign use is a blend of the two.

Outsourcing has two basic meanings--a company hiring an outside resource
(an accounting firm, a law firm, a vendor to complete a part of the
contract, etc.) to do work that they would rather not use permanent
employees on. Bringing in temporary staff to perform a certain duty is
not outsourcing, but hiring another company to perform just that task is.

So the OED has this meaning:

>   The action or practice of obtaining goods or services by contract
> from outside sources.


The second meaning is national--instead of outsourcing tasks, jobs are
being outsourced out of the country. So a task that might otherwise be
done by a US-based company is sent out of the country for someone else
to do cheaper. For that matter, the entire company, sans the employees,
may be sent elsewhere. The difference is not particularly subtle, but
the OED does not have this one.

AHD bridges the two ideas by simply suggesting that cost-cutting is the
primary purpose of outsourcing:

> The procuring of services or products, such as the parts used in
> manufacturing a motor vehicle, from an outside supplier or
> manufacturer in order to cut costs.

But this is preposterous. Standard outsourcing exists for other reasons
as well--usually to avoid the creation of a unit that would only perform
a particular task or to allow core employees to focus on a particular
set of tasks while letting an outside source handle peripheral tasks.
Legal and accounting outsourcing can be done for the purpose of avoiding
a conflict of interest. Some law firms outsource some of their work in
order to reduce the load--in no small part due to the fact that the
money to cover the costs would come from a different account
(non-payroll) and not because outsourcing would be cheaper (there is a
certain convenience to not hiring and then laying off employees only for
the duration of the excess load).

In contrast, international outsourcing is done solely for the purpose of
cutting costs (and now that I said that, someone is going to come up
with an example where this is not the case--but the point is that the
entire process is different, thus requiring a separate definition).

Collins lists two meaning, but neither deals with international outsourcing:

> 1. the act of subcontracting (work) to another company
>  -->  "The difficulties of outsourcing have been compounded by the
> increasing resistance of trade unions."
> 2. the act of buying in (components for a product) rather than
> manufacturing them

Macmillan adds another twist, suggesting that outsourcing may be done
for the purpose of obtaining expert work, not available in-house:

> an arrangement in which work is done by people from outside your
> company, usually by a company that is expert in that type of work

[My suggestion above was that often the less-expert work gets
outsourced--but, apparently, it works both ways.]

MWOLD gives nearly the same definition as OED, but the examples are of
the other kind.

> **to procure (as some goods or services needed by a business or
> organization) under contract with an outside
> <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/outside> supplier <decided
> to /outsource/ some back-office operations>

Examples:

> //
> The company /outsources/ many of its jobs to less developed countries.
> The work was /outsourced/ to a factory in China.

Wiktionary comes up with the most compact definition of outsourcing.

> The transfer of a business function to an external service provider


Clearly, the "insourcing vs. outsourcing" meme pushed by the Obama ads
applies to the second meaning of oursourcing. Simply hiring another
company to perform a task is not politically sensitive, but sending jobs
to other countries certainly is--and it's only too easy to accuse Mitt
Romney of that (some have suggested that he pioneered international
outsourcing as a cost-cutting measure). So "insourcing" has to be the
opposite of that, or keeping the jobs /in/ the country. But that's not
quite the same as insourcing 1.--keeping the jobs in-house. It merely
refers to a protectionist preference of hiring US-based workers to
perform tasks. In some sense, a company can be outsourcing a particular
job, but insourcing it--in the Obama sense--by hiring a US company to do
it. But one can also look at the contrast as something else--US should
not be sending jobs overseas, but bringing foreign jobs here, in the OED
insourcing 2. sense.

Obviously, someone who disagrees with me on drawing the distinction
between two different kinds of outsourcing will not see any controversy
in the Obama ads using "insourcing" for contrast. That still would not
explain why there is only one ousourcing and two insourcing entries.

     VS-)

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