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seen a decisive shift away from managing such workers within the conventional
hierarchy of the firm, as organizations have made increasing moves to develop
alternative, and less costly forms of control. These include the re-engineering
of work and the use of IT systems to monitor knowledge workers’ activities.
Re-engineering involves a shift away from functional silos and towards an
integrated, cross-organizational work process, as described in Chapter 3. This
approach was adopted by many organizations as a way of gaining greater
transparency of the work process, and thereby increasing the accountability
of knowledge worker groups to both managers and customers (Davenport et
al., 1996). Similar motives lay behind the extensive deployment of ICT-based
monitoring systems, described in Chapter 7.
More radically, however, some sectors have moved beyond these strategies by
‘outsourcing’ knowledge work altogether. This involves subcontracting knowl-
edge work functions to external service suppliers. IT professionals and HR man-
agers have been particularly affected by the outsourcing of their work. In some
sectors, outsourcing also increasingly means ‘offshoring’ as work is relocated
offshore (e.g. from the UK or USA to sites in India and China).
As explicit management strategies, outsourcing and offshoring have really
gathered pace in the last decade or so, spurred on by the example set by leading
multinational firms such as Kodak and American Express. Over time, the empha-
sis has shifted away from simple cost reduction towards a desire to re-focus the
business on its core competencies. Activities which are ‘non-core’ thus become
candidates for outsourcing (Lewin and Peeters, 2006).
The kinds of knowledge work most vulnerable to these strategies include
those which are highly reliant on a codified knowledge base, and which can be
delivered from remote locations. One obvious candidate has been the delivery
of IT-based services. IT expertise is in some ways the victim of its own success
in that developments in ICTs combined with the great spread of IT applications
have combined to make it a vital service, but one which can be readily provided
from remote sites or by external suppliers. In some ways, this is a classic example
of knowledge becoming a commodity, but with the caveat that the challenges
of outsourcing work seemingly reliant on codified knowledge are often under-
estimated (David et al., 2008).
HRM work itself has also increasingly been subject to outsourcing as firms
look to external ‘shared service centres’ to provide HR support. Though a softer
form of expertise than IT, HRM work is vulnerable because it is codified proce-
durally in the form of standardized and centralized service offerings. Moreover,
when the shared service centre model is combined with Internet-based self-
service functions for staff, the costs of HRM can be dramatically reduced; hence
making the outsourcing of HRM an attractive option.
The overall result of these changes has been that hierarchical forms of orga-
nization have given way in many sectors to more market-based forms, where
knowledge work is directed through explicit target-based contracts. For some
groups, these trends may even mean that their work role shifts to what is
termed ‘contingent employment’ where they move from one temporary job

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