Is the World Flat or Spiky? Information Intensity, Skills, and Global Service Disaggregation

Is the World Flat or Spiky? Information Intensity, Skills, and Global Service Disaggregation

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Article ID: iaor200920426
Country: United States
Volume: 18
Issue: 3
Start Page Number: 237
End Page Number: 259
Publication Date: Sep 2007
Journal: Information Systems Research
Authors: ,
Keywords: information
Abstract:

Which service occupations are the most susceptible to global disaggregation? What are the factors and mechanisms that make service occupations amenable to global disaggregation? This research addresses these questions by building on previous work by Apte and Mason (1995) and Rai et al. (2006) that focuses on the unbundling of information and physical flows. We propose a theory of service disaggregation and argue that high information intensity makes an occupation more amenable to disaggregation because the activities in such occupations can be codified, standardized, and modularized. We empirically validate our theoretical model using data on more than 300 service occupations. We find that at the mean skill level, the information intensity of an occupation is positively associated with the disaggregation potential of that occupation, and the effect of information intensity on disaggregation potential is mediated by the modularizability of an occupation. We also find that skills moderate the effect of information intensity on service disaggregation.

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