The growth in the outsourcing of services has become one of the most relevant features of the changes in manufacturing firms’ behaviour. This paper provides empirical evidence about the extent and evolution of services outsourcing by Spanish manufacturing firms in 1990-1998. A general increase...

Outsourcing of services is one of the most important phenomena that are reshaping firms boundaries in the last decades. This article assesses the reasons leading manufacturing firms to contract out some service activities instead of providing them internally. The theoretical framework, inspired...

The literature of service outsourcing is mainly focused on case studies or specific service activities. However, there is no evidence about the pattern of relatedness among outsourcing of services. This paper analyses this issue by a relatedness index previously applied in the framework of...