This paper investigates hidden costs of offshoring, i.e. unexpected and often hard to measure costs resulting from the relocation of business tasks and activities outside the home country. Particularly, the paper shows that hidden costs can be explained by the degree of offshoring complexity....

This paper explores knowledge services clusters (KSCs) as a distinct and increasingly important form of geographic cluster, in particular in emerging economies: KSCs are defined as geographic concentrations of lower-cost skills serving global demand for increasingly commoditized knowledge...

We review key drivers, trends and consequences of global sourcing of business processes – the sourcing of administrative and more knowledge-intensive processes from globally dispersed locations. We argue that global sourcing, which is also associated with ‘offshoring' and ‘offshore...

This paper studies how the logic of firm governance choices varies as a function of the time of adoption of particular sourcing practices. Using data on the diffusion of global business services sourcing as a management practice from early experiments in the 1980s through 2011, we show that the...

Prior literature is ambivalent about whether organizational complexity has positive or negative effects on firm performance. Using rich data on global service providers, we explore this ambivalence by disentangling performance consequences of different types of organizational complexity. We show...

Efforts of emerging economies to upgrade into global market capabilities are often conceptualized as either discrete choices or ongoing experiments. Mediating between these perspectives, this study uses the concepts of value regime and economic imaginary to examine micro-dynamics in upgrading....

Building linkages with global lead firms, so-called strategic coupling, can be an effective way for emerging economies to upgrade into higher-level market capabilities. However, strategic coupling can be very difficult in particular for peripheral regions, which typically lack the size, skilled...

The seemingly unlimited availability of science and engineering (Samp;E) talent in emerging economies and the increasing difficulties of finding such talent in advanced economies have given rise to a new trend: the global sourcing of Samp;E talent. This paper examines the antecedents and...

Africa is an increasingly important business context, yet we still know very little about it. We review the challenges and opportunities that firms in Africa face and propose that these can serve as the basis for extending current theories and models of the firm. We do so by challenging some of...

As a latecomer economy, Africa faces persistent difficulties with catching up in global markets. This study examines the strategic potential of community-based hybrid models, which balance market profitability with social impact in local communities. Focusing on the global business services...