Call for contributions to a book entitled: The Offshoring Challenge: Strategic Design and Innovation for Tomorrow's Organization.
Published by Springer in the Decision engineering series (edited by Torben Pedersen, Lydia Bals & Peter Ørberg Jensen)
The continuous search for efficiency gains and the goal of attaining a sustainable competitive advantage have steadily increased the volume of goods and services procured globally from third party vendors since the 1980s (e.g. Hätonen and Eriksson, 2009). In this context, named as "the next wave of globalization" (Dossani and Kenney, 2007), the "offshoring" phenomenon has more recently stimulated research and political debates. Pushing the frontier further, fine-slicing of corporate activities occurs at an ever increasing level of granularity (Contractor, Kumar, Kundu and Pedersen, 2010).
Here, we envision covering all potential business models from offshore outsourcing to third party providers, over cooperative hybrid arrangements to internal organizational set-ups including captive offshore centers (Jahns, Hartmann and Bals, 2006). We invite contributions with significant insights regarding:
- The increasing offshoring of knowledge-intensive services (e.g. R&D)
- The offshoring process (e.g. building offshoring capability)
- Business models incorporating offshoring
- The hidden costs of offshoring (e.g. on design and architecture)
- The administration of offshoring activities within firms
- The organization and evolution of offshore outsourcing partnerships between client firm and the outsourcing partner
- The implications of climate change on offshoring dynamics (e.g. importance of broad geographical footprint for natural disaster risk mitigation)
Studies on firm-level, industry-level and national level and both empirical and theoretical papers are welcome. The book is aimed at a broad audience of scholars, students and practitioners in the fields of strategy, international business and operations management.
The plan is that the book will contain approximately 10-15 chapters, treating the different aspects of offshoring as highlighted above. The paper length should be at a maximum of 7,500 words per paper including references.
If you are interested, please send an email (subject "offshoring abstract") to Lydia Bals (lb.smg@cbs.dk) and Peter Ørberg Jensen (poe.smg@cbs.dk) with a tentative title and keywords for the topics by 1 May 2011. A 2-3 pages abstract of the paper/paper idea will be sufficient, but longer abstract/full papers are also accepted at this stage if this is more convenient to authors. Authors are welcome to send more than one abstract.
By late May we will send out notifications and invitations for full papers. By 31 September, 2011 we expect submission of the full manuscript.
A workshop on the same theme and based on the selected papers will be organized in Copenhagen 27-28 October 2011. Authors are invited to participate and present their papers at the workshop in which author(s) will interact with other researchers and the special issue editors.* Following the workshop, the editorial team will make decisions as to the final disposition of manuscripts.
There will be time after the workshop to integrate comments obtained at the workshop and feedback from editors prior to submission of final manuscripts in February 2012. Publication of the book at Springer is planned for late summer 2012.
Summary of Timeline:
Deadline for abstract (2-3p): 1 May 2011
Deadline for full manuscripts: 31 September 2011
Workshop in Copenhagen: 27-28 October 2011
Final submission of revised manuscript version: February 2012
If you have any questions, please direct them to one of the three editors: Torben Pedersen (tp.smg@cbs.dk), Lydia Bals (lb.smg@cbs.dk) and Peter D. Ørberg Jensen (poe.smg@cbs.dk).
We look forward to your proposals,
Torben Pedersen, Lydia Bals & Peter D. Ørberg Jensen
Dr. Lydia Bals
Visiting Scholar
Copenhagen Business School
Department of Strategic Management and Globalization
Porcelaenshaven 24B
2000 Frederiksberg
Denmark
Email 1: lb.smg@cbs.dk
Email2: lydia.bals@web.de