Pick up just about any major newspaper in the United States these days, and you’ll find the o words somewhere on the front page. Articles about offshoring lament the movement of labor to foreign countries, and outsourcing headlines decry the loss of middle-class jobs to contractors. Of late, the o words have been conflated to suggest that a corporate cabal bent on “exporting America” has handed high-paying, white-collar American jobs to well-trained but less expensive workers in India and other locales.

A version of this article appeared in the June 2004 issue of Harvard Business Review.