The current issue I wrote about previously in Week One was the pros and cons of domestic and international outsourcing.  My connection to this topic is that I am majoring in Business Management, and I read about outsourcing  in my Management 101 class. 

Here is the research question I first came up with.

1)      What are the pros and cons of domestic and international outsourcing for the U.S.?

After reading the articles on narrowing and broadening my question, here are some new questions.

              -Narrow

                             2)  How does outsourcing affect the average American worker today?

                            3)  Is outsourcing a good activity for U.S. business owners to engage in today?

              -Broad

                             4)  What are the pros and cons of outsourcing?

                             5)  What are the impacts of domestic and international outsourcing on the U.S.?

In my questions, I am not sure whether I should talk about only domestic or international outsourcing, so I don’t know if you had an opinion on that?

Possible Semester Topic

I am going to be honest, I am having a hard time figuring out what topics to write about and narrowing them down.  So I guess I will just throw out some possible ideas. 
 My major is business management.  Something that interests me in the business world is outsourcing.  A few months ago I had no idea what outsourcing was, until it came up in a management class.  After that I became intrigued and researched it a little bit more for another class.  I learned that there’s overseas outsourcing and domestic outsourcing.  I only researched the overseas outsourcing a little bit, and learned that some companies send their manufacturing processes and information technology services overseas.  The benefits being lower production costs overseas and skilled IT workers especially in India.  Some say that outsourcing overseas kills the American economy because American jobs are lost, while others say that outsourcing actually creates American jobs because companies tend to become more efficient after outsourcing and thus can expand.  If I used outsourcing as my topic, I could research domestic outsourcing more, the pros and cons of domestic and overseas outsourcing, and research whether or not outsourcing (both kinds) is a good activity for the U.S. to engage in.  My audience would be those who have their own businesses and are wondering whether or not they should be involved in outsourcing.  My audience could also be workers in general, because their jobs are affected by outsourcing.  So some keywords to research this topic are “domestic outsourcing pros and cons”, “overseas outsourcing pros and cons”, and “effect of outsourcing on U.S. economy”.  In connection with this, I could research globalization of businesses, and whether or not it is good for companies to go international or not.         

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My first writing journal entry!