Source It Out

摘要

These days, outsourcing is all the rage in the united states; one can follow it all the way from the campus to the national park system, then to Iraq, and finally to our domestic political infrastructure. Beginning with the first: It used to be that faculty members at Generic State U. could be sure that the campus bookstore and food service were home-grown enterprises, staffed by people they got to know. Now those enterprises are likely to be connected to Borders or a multinational food service company. These arrangements, a prominent feature of the outsourcing epidemic, are popularly called public-private partnerships. The term lends a sense of comfort, but it also hides some nagging problems.