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...