A Paradigmatic and Methodological Review of Research in Outsourcing

Abstract

Due to the growing academic and practitioner interest in the field of outsourcing, there is a need to do a comprehensive assessment and synthesis of research activities to date. This article addresses this need and examines the academic literature on information systems outsourcing and business process outsourcing using a paradigmatic and methodological lens. The objective of this article is fourfold. Firstly, it examines the status of outsourcing research from 1995 to 2005 in eight leading academic journals, to compare the current research trends with past research directions in terms of methodologies applied. Secondly, it analyzes the research paradigms adopted in these research papers using the Operations Research Paradigm framework. Thirdly, it compares and contrasts the outsourcing research work published in three leading European journals with the work published in three leading American journals. Finally, it uncovers the implications of this study and the directions for future research.

Revisiting the outsourcing debate: two sides of the same story

“…A contract can help both parties to fulfil their obligations by incorporating clauses to deal with uncertainties and disputes (Alpar andSaharia 1995, Osei-Bryson andNgwenyama 2006). Although Mcfarlan and Nolan (1995) mention that the contract is one of the most important parts in the outsourcing venture, there has been a dearth of research that has examined the concept from this specific perspective Qureshi 2006, Yadav andGupta 2008). Much of the empirical research has endeavoured to assess the impact of outsourcing at the whole-of-organisation level, employing either organisations or managers from organisations as unit of analysis (Dibbern et al 2004).…”

Researches in Corporate Social Responsibility: A Review of Shifting Focus, Paradigms, and Methodologies

“…The development of science can be seen as a sequence of revisions of hypothetical statements (Sachan and Datta, 2005 (ii) Paradigmatic shift review For the purpose of paradigmatic shift analysis, we have used the operations research paradigm framework adapted from Meredith et al (1989) shown in Table II. This framework has been used by various researchers in the operations management area (like Meredith et al, 1989;Sachan and Datta, 2005) and Information systems area (like Yadav and Gupta, 2008). This framework serves as a comprehensive analytic tool in a two-dimensional format to analyze the research paradigms.…”

“…For the purpose of methodological review (Yadav and Gupta, 2008) nature and types of articles; research design and approach; nature of research design; sources and nature of data; data testing and data analysis techniques etc. of the selected articles have been studied.…”

“…Certainly, there are possibilities that certain research could use both quantitative and qualitative methods in different stages of the study. On such occasions, they are categorized as a mixed research method (Yadav and Gupta, 2008).…”

Corporate branding literature: A research paradigm review

“…The 32 empirical studies were analyzed to understand the industry focus that was considered by the researchers, and Table 5 Meredith et al (1989) provided a comprehensive framework ( Figure 1 ) to analyze the research paradigm that has been used in various disciplines such as operations management ( Sachan and Datta, 2005 ), information systems ( Yadav and Gupta, 2008 ). The framework is built around two axesRational -Existential and Natural -Artifi cial .…”