Outsourcing of IT, tech support and other business services has become a global trend. Watching India’s success in the outsourcing space, many developing countries now try to grow their own business service economy, including countries in Africa. But what does it really take to become a global...

Prior research on project-based organizing in creative industries has emphasized the importance of regionally embedded institutions, creative networks and intermediaries in the development of regional project ecologies. Recently, film and television production in the United States has expanded...

Western multinational corporations (MNCs) increasingly locate advanced functions, including product development and engineering, in emerging economies to gain access to lower-cost science and engineering (S&E) talent and specialized service providers. Over time, new S&E clusters have developed...

This paper explores local and global dynamics underlying the development of knowledge services clusters, which we define as new geographic concentrations of technical talent and service providers offering upstream technical and knowledge-intensive business services to regional and global...

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....

Recent research suggests that unequal access to home country institutional resources affects firm internationalization strategies. We add to this debate, based on an analysis of state-owned (SOEs) and non-state-owned (NSOEs) Chinese mining firms, by developing a more dynamic and multi-layered...

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...