برون سپاری خارجی خدمات : دیدگاه تکاملی

Offshore outsourcing is gaining increasing importance and attention in both theory and practice. The purpose of this research is to use nine in-depth case studies to analyze the evolution of offshore services outsourcing with regard to how expectations and governance structures change over time. Five testable propositions are presented, building on institutional theory, transaction cost, and resource-based perspectives. The cases demonstrate that offshore outsourcing is initiated because of increasing internal and external pressure to conform and reduce costs. Moreover, companies “chase” efficiency improvements in other geographic locations. But after reducing costs, companies discover more strategic benefits such as the potential to increase quality and market share. Importantly, as buyer–supplier relationships move from tactical to more strategic, expectations and governance structures change.

The offshore outsourcing phenomenon has gained increasing importance and attention in both theory and practice and has been coined “the next wave of globalization” (Dossani and Kenney, 2007). Companies are increasingly offshore outsourcing internal business processes to low-cost locations outside of the buying firm's country of origin (Drezner, 2004) that satisfy their requirements for highly competitive, well-educated employees. As such, offshore outsourcing is perceived as a way to reduce labor costs for services that are highly dependent on skilled labor for efficient delivery (Ellram et al., 2008). Overall, offshore outsourcing of services is a rapidly growing phenomenon in global business and there has been relatively little research to date in this area (Vivek et al., 2008; Lovelock and Yip, 1996). Therefore, offshore outsourcing affords an interesting research opportunity. The specific focus on offshore outsourcing limits the scope of our analysis to the “buy” arrangements in the realm of offshoring (Jahns et al., 2006), thus allowing for more in-depth analysis. Recent large-scale empirical research has indicated that in practice companies’ motives for engaging in offshore outsourcing change over time (Lewin and Couto, 2007). Nevertheless, in-depth company level case study and theory-driven research concerning this phenomenon is still relatively scarce. Therefore, the first purpose of this paper is to provide detailed insights into the evolution of the offshore outsourcing phenomenon through case study research with a particular focus on what motivates companies to offshore outsource and the governance structures these companies employ. This specific focus affords an interesting research opportunity because the company-level dynamics of offshore outsourcing are not yet well understood. The second purpose is to further advance the understanding of offshore outsourcing using three different theoretical lenses to frame propositions based on the case results: institutional theory, transaction cost economics (TCE) and resource-based view (RBV). These three theories were selected, because of the demonstrated applicability in extant research on offshoring. With this background, we set out to address the following two research questions:

At the beginning of this paper, the following two research questions were introduced: “How does the governance structure and expectations for offshore outsourcing change over time?” and “How do institutional theory, transaction cost economics, and the resource based view provide insights into the phenomenon of offshore outsourcing of services?” Concerning the first research question, the case study results have shown that companies’ governance structures and expectations change over time. The findings associated with this question are summarized in Table 4 and Table 6. Regarding the second question, we have provided support that these three theories hold particular potential for application in the offshoring context. Both of these topics are discussed at more length below, in the theoretical and managerial implications. These implications are then followed by a presentation of limitations and potential future research.