Special Themed Symposium:
Outsourcing and Offshoring
published by
Journal of Management Studies, Volume 47, Number 8, December
2010
Edited by Farok J. Contractor, Vikas Kumar, Sumit Kundu and
Torben Pedersen
Theme and Abstract
This Special Issue of Journal of Management studies address
a fundamental economics question "What is the nature of the firm in the 21st
Century" in a world where companies are increasingly retrenching,
fragmenting and relocating operations, and where close to half of world
trade will soon be in intermediate goods and services (unfinished
components) rather than finished products.
In the largest sense, global strategy amounts to (1) the
optimal disaggregation or slicing of the firm's value chain into as many
constituent pieces as organizationally and economically feasible, followed
by (2) decisions as how each slice should be allocated geographically
('offshoring') and organizationally ('outsourcing'). Offshoring and
outsourcing are treated as strategies that need to be simultaneously
analyzed, where just 'core' segments of the value chain are retained
in-house, while others are optimally dispersed geographically, as well as
dispersed over allies and contractors. This amounts to a reconsideration of
the nature of the firm that captures the dynamic changes in global
configuration and a reconsideration of what constitutes 'core' activities
that need to be retained internally.
The article also proposes a new agenda for future research:
What is each firm's optimal degree of disaggregation and global dispersion
-- given that the more finely a firm slices its value chain, and then
outsources or offshores those pieces, it gains efficiency, but also
increases its complexity and overhead costs.
While management scholars do not address this issue, the
theme of this symposium signifies how far humankind has progressed since the
days when each hunter-gatherer family was a self contained unit (it built
its own tools, hunted its own meals or baked its own bread) to a stage in
economic progress where a substantial portion of the value chain of a firm
may be contributed by external providers, alliance partners and foreign
subsidiaries - at opposed to "at home" and "in-company" operations. Firms
today are more "virtual" than ever before and the end product or service is
the culmination of a network of geographically far-flung providers, with the
focal firm playing the role of a network node, coordinator and optimizer.
____________________________________________________
Contents:
Reconceptualizing the Firm in a World of
Outsourcing and Offshoring: The Organizational and Geographical Relocation
of High-Value Company Functions
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2010.00945.x/abstrac
t>
-- Farok J. Contractor, Vikas Kumar, Sumit
K. Kundu and Torben Pedersen
Make, Buy or Ally? Theoretical Perspectives
on Knowledge Process Outsourcing through Alliances
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2010.00944.x/abstrac
t>
-- Susan M. Mudambi and Stephen Tallman
Strategic Orientations, Knowledge
Acquisition, and Firm Performance: The Perspective of the Vendor in
Cross-Border Outsourcing
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-- Yuan Li, Zelong Wei and Yi Liu
Balancing Internal and External Knowledge
Acquisition: The Gains and Pains from R&D Outsourcing
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t>
-- Christoph Grimpe and Ulrich Kaiser
The Strategic Nexus of Offshoring and
Outsourcing Decisions
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t>
-- Ram Mudambi and Markus Venzin
Factors Determining Offshore Location Choice
for R&D Projects: A Comparative Study of Developed and Emerging Regions
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-- Mehmet Demirbag and Keith W. Glaister
1. Top of page
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joms.2010.47.issue-8/issuetoc>
2. Original Articles
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joms.2010.47.issue-8/issuetoc>
3. Review Papers
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joms.2010.47.issue-8/issuetoc>
Ownership as a Form of Corporate Governance
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2010.00929.x/abstrac
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-- Brian L. Connelly, Robert E. Hoskisson,
Laszlo Tihanyi and S. Trevis Certo
Institutional Investors and Institutional
Environment: A Comparative Analysis and Review
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2010.00930.x/abstrac
t>
-- Richard A. Johnson, Karen Schnatterly,
Scott G. Johnson and Shih-Chi Chiu
Prof. Farok J. Contractor
Department of Management and Global Business
Rutgers Business School-Newark and New Brunswick
Rutgers University
1 Washington Park
Newark, New Jersey 07102-1897, USA
WEB PAGE:
http://business.rutgers.edu/default.aspx?id=378
farok@andromeda.rutgers.edu
Recent Book: Global Outsourcing and Offshoring (Cambridge
University Press)
http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item5562690/?site_locale=en_GB