This paper investigates whether reshoring of business services is the result of company response to performance shortcomings of the initiative offshored or instead is motivated by persisting with original offshoring strategy (disintegration advantages, accessing new markets and costsaving), regardless of offshoring performance. Our empirical analysis, based on data from the Offshoring Research Network, shows that both arguments hold. Moreover, when offshoring had been motivated by accessing to new markets and its performance is unsatisfactory, companies are likely to relocate. However, unsatisfactory performance of activities offshored for efficiency reasons or search of talent, do not necessarily lead companies to relocate elsewhere.

Experience, meant as the repetition of the same action, is considered a predictor of the entry mode choice in foreign markets because it allows reducing uncertainty. However, repetition does not necessarily increase the expected performance, depending on the learning stemming from previous experiences. Focusing on offshoring decisions, namely the choice between captive and outsourcing entry mode, we distinguish between the inertial repetition of routines vs. the mindful repetition of previous entry modes (where the company distinguishes and internalizes the outcomes of the past offshoring initiatives associated to the entry choices). We claim that: (i) the latter leads to higher growth perspectives for the focal offshoring initiative, and; (ii) learning is higher when repetition concerns captive entry modes. Our empirical analysis, run on 410 companies' offshoring decisions undertaken from 2006 to 2011, confirms our expectation.

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AfTer experiencing decAdes of offshoring, involving not only manufacturing (Fratocchi et al., 2014) but also business functions and services (Albertoni & Elia, 2014; Lewin et al., 2009; Manning et al., 2008), some companies have started to bring back their activities to their home country. This phenomenon has been labelled with several terms; in this short paper we use the term reshoring and we focus on the voluntary (i.e., not forced by host country governments) corporate strategy regarding the home-country's partial or total relocation of production or other business functions to serve the local, regional, or global demands.

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