Qantas will need to think carefully how it balances its social obligations with its cost rationalisation program, but it is not prevented from continuing to outsource workers after the High Court denied its appeal, a leading academic says.

Senior professor at the Sydney Business School of the University of Wollongong, Paul Gollan, said Qantas would need to be much more engaged with its workers to deliver clearer messages about the motivations for outsourcing and commercial imperatives, to ward against the perception that it was acting to bust up industrial action.