(Re)defining outsourcing in education

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I (re)define outsourcing in a way that reflects the nature of the practice in education. While business and management definitions of outsourcing have been generative to this point, they are relatively broad and place wide boundaries on the practice. Moreover, they do not acknowledge the interpretation and enactment of outsourcing in contexts where economic models were never supposed to dominate. To create a bespoke and ‘stipulative’ definition that is a better fit-for-purpose, I selected one school subject, Health and Physical Education (HPE), and one country, Australia, as an illustrative case. I then analysed three literature corpora to find examples and attributes of outsourcing. I argue that recruiting this new definition will allow scholars within and beyond the field of HPE to construct new arguments and generate different types of rich data on the practice in ways that they might not necessarily have been able to previously.

KEYWORDS:

• Outsourcing
• external providers
• health and physical education

Acknowledgement

I want to sincerely thank Dr Eimear Enright for her valuable, rigorous, and thoughtful feedback on previous drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Leigh Sperka http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9946-7548

Notes

1 I have deliberately chosen to use the word ‘deliver’ when I talk about external providers and their products and services. This decision was made based on the frequency this verb was used by external providers. For instance, Tennis Australia (2018) explain that their ‘Tennis for Secondary Schools programme aims to support all schools … to deliver tennis in a modified environment to promote and encourage lifelong physical activity and health in students’. Further, this word acts as a distinction between the roles of teachers and external providers.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under Grant DP140102607; and the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.