18 THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING NEAREST: NEARSHORE SOFTWARE OUTSOURCING AND GLOBALIZATION Abstract DISCOURSE Pamela Abbott Judge Institute of Management University of Cambridge Cambridge United Kingdom Matthew Jones Judge Institute of Management University of Cambridge Cambridge United Kingdom In the idea of the "death of distance," globalization discourse presents a picture of a world of global social and economic integration, declining cultural differentiation, spatial and temporal disembedding of social practices, and the econo- mic primacy of dematerialized knowledge work. Nearshore software outsourcing, a subcategory of offshore software out- sourcing in which the development centers are located outside of the outsourcer 's host country, but in the same, or a similar, time-zone, would appear to provide a prime example of this concept. Drawing on evidence from two Caribbean nearshore software development initiatives and interviews with nearshore practitioners, however, this paper suggests that nearshore soft- ware outsourcing reflects, and perhaps extends, many of the features of globalization discourse, while at the same time contrasting with it. In particular, the notion that globalization inevitably leads to placelessness and homogeneity, and that the nation state as an influence on economic activity is disappearing, are questioned. The original version of this chapter was revised: The copyright line was incorrect. This has been corrected. The Erratum to this chapter is available at DOI: © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2003 E. H. Wynn et al. (eds.), Global and Organizational Discourse about Information Technology 10.1007/978-0-387-35634-1_28