Insourcing
Categories: Company Management
See: Outsourcing.
Insourcing. Think: boot-strapping, doing it yourself, making it work on your own. Yes, American companies have been forced to outsource a ton of things in the modern era. How does an American company compete in a world market where labor in India, Mexico, China, Ukraine, and other places deliver for a dollar an hour what it costs American employers $27 an hour to produce? It doesn't.
So outsourcing isn't a fad; it's a Thing. It's not going away. But insourcing happens as well. Americans produce some things better than anyone else in the world (and we are the #1 producer of Americans, mind you). So when companies insource, there's usually a financial (and a kind of political/ethical) press behind the practice as well.
The advent of cheap, efficient robots will likely change world dynamics again. What happens when outsourcing to poor countries for manufacture becomes cheaper than having a robot do whatever-it-is-that-they-do, at home/domestically? We're just hoping they stay away from Shmoop writers.