I don't quite get the penultimate paragraph. What's the connection between "information technology" and outsourcing???
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I think the connection is this: IT, and the global telecommunications grid it's a part of, makes remote command and control (aka, 'management') possible.
IT also enables capital to maintain extraordinarily complex - and widely distributed - process webs.
Chuck Grimes wrote a fascinating post about this from a manufacturing point of view several months ago. The jist, as I recall, was that computer-network coordinated processes gave companies the ability to create a massive jigsaw puzzle, dispersing (and bringing back together into finished products) design, manufacture, assembly, back office and management tasks from various centers around the globe.
A sort of ultimate atomization machine.
Of course, none of this is entirely new but IT deepens and increases the complexity of global capital's high wire act.
Which is how it facilitates outsourcing of all sorts.
In the first stage of capital's computerization, the machines were used to duplicate and then replace - to whatever extent possible - human labor (auto assembly, secretary, file clerk).
Now, in this second stage, capital is employing the machines - in their networked configuration (a different sort of animal from discrete devices) - to create almost wholly new methods of profit maximization that no reasonable number of workers could hope to coordinate and perform.
To a large extent, Enron style deceptions are the result, not only of capital's long understood tendencies, but also of the ever more complex and difficult to track manipulations made possible by networked computing power.
I predict the third stage will see businesses learning the uses of massively parallel and truly distributed processing (similar to SETI @Home's shared CPU cycle model) and well tuned 'expert systems'.
.d.