Conceptual Issues in Services Offshoring Research: A Multidisciplinary Review

Abstract

Offshoring has emerged as an important economic and social phenomenon that has generated intense interest from practitioners, the popular media, and policy makers. In addition, there is a nascent but rich research literature on offshoring developing in management, international business (IB), and related fields. In this review, we survey and integrate offshoring literature from several disciplines and draw implications of this review for management and IB research. We conclude that offshoring may challenge some aspects of established management and IB theory or require revision and/ or modification of those theories. We adopt a multilevel coevolutionary perspective as one potential integrative approach to offshoring research and identify important future areas for further enrichment of this emerging area.