Articulation Work and the Management of Intersubjectivity Disjunctures in Offshored Production

Abstract

Since the move away from integrated value chains in production in the 1980s, the outsourcing and offshoring of various aspects of manufacturing has become commonplace. This has led to global production and marketing relationships between enterprises in numerous different countries, a prominent axis being between Europe and Asia. This paper reports on a study of one such offshoring relationship between a German SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) and their Chinese subsidiary, the trials and tribulations of the collaboration between them, and the implications of this for our understanding of how articulation work might be best supported in the context of global production. We also look at how a separate entity, which we term an 'articulation hub', was established to support articulation between the sites. While a number of studies have looked at articulation work in Global Software Development (GSD), there are very few ethnographic studies of offshored manufacturing, despite the unique challenges it presents. We find here that issues arise not only because of differences in technology environments, infrastructures, and cultural expectations, but also because of differing development strategies and business philosophies. The core problem confronting articulation work in offshored production is the difficulty of arriving at a mutually-grounded intersubjectivity, where shared assumptions about working practices and their relative importance and value can be trusted to apply, leading to what we term 'intersubjectivity disjunctures'. These disjunctures have a number of important implications for accomplishing articulation work. This paper offers a number of contributions to CSCW. First, it adds to a very thin corpus of CSCW-relevant ethnographic studies of global manufacturing. Second, it finds that articulation work in offshored production is less closely-coupled than it is in other distributed settings, making conventionally promoted solutions, such as knowledge sharing and relationship building, less relevant. Third, it reveals how differences in moral reasoning can result in different sites assigning very different priorities to articulation work. Finally, while articulation work is typically seen to be invisible work in CSCW, we argue that, in this context, there are a number of ways in which using a separate hub to actively render articulation work visible may be the best solution.