Managing Institutional Logics and Corporate Social Performance in a Case Study of Impact Sourcing

Abstract

This thesis examines the viability of impact sourcing in commercial outsourcing arrangements. Impact sourcing is an outsourcing practice that has the potential to create social value by providing outsourcing jobs to marginalised individuals who have limited opportunities to work. This thesis focuses, in particular, on exploring management and impact assessment aspects of impact sourcing at institutional, organisational, and individual levels of analysis. In doing so, the thesis borrows concepts from management and development studies, making it a multidisciplinary study.The research draws on concepts of competing institutional logics to investigate how the social and commercial orientation of impact sourcing can be managed by outsourcing organisations. Furthermore, it uses the concepts of institutional logics and corporate social strategy to understand how the challenges of local institutional contexts influence the implementation of impact sourcing and how outsourcing organisations could manage these challenges to ensure that the social and economic value creation objectives of impact sourcing can remain intact. The thesis also focuses on impact assessment of impact sourcing to evaluate the social welfare impact on outsourcing employees by applying the Capability Approach concept from development studies and corporate social performance (CSP) concepts from the management literature.The research adopts an interpretive single case study of a US-based publicly listed outsourcing organisation providing healthcare IT and BPO services to the US healthcare industry from its two offshore-outsourcing centres in Pakistan. The case study organisation practises impact sourcing through one of its offshore-outsourcing centre in the small, earthquake affected district of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan. The findings are reported in three empirical articles. The key theoretical contribution of this research to the study of impact sourcing is threefold. First, the global outsourcing organisations practising impact sourcing are complex in nature because of various actors located at different locations having different social and economic interests. Thus, the outsourcing organisation needs to adopt a 'collective response strategy' to satisfy the competing demands of the social and commercial orientations of impact sourcing. Second, commercial outsourcing organisations require additional investment of resources and culturally sensitive management practices to implement impact sourcing in marginalised communities. These are required not only to create social value through impact sourcing, but also to remain commercially viable, as both social and economic value creation components are interlinked. Third, the most novel contribution of the research is to propose a model to assess the impact of impact sourcing by incorporating both organisational and employee perspectives to evaluate the social welfare outcomes for the employees.This thesis offers significant contributions to the study of institutional logics. It illustrates that competing logics may not be uniform across all sub-units of global organisations; there may be enclaves where different logics influence at different intensities. The thesis identifies that institutional orders in society are intertwined; the institutional logic derived from an institutional order may be influenced by other institutional orders existing in the society. The research also contributes to the study of CSP by focusing on people and society in its outcome measurement.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2016
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Brian Nicholson (Supervisor) & Sharon Morgan (Supervisor)