Business process outsourcing studies: a critical review and research directions

Strategic innovation through outsourcing: The role of relational and contractual governance

“…In this regard, our study extends past studies that examined the effect of relational and contractual governance on outsourcing performance in two ways. First, results of our study suggest that outsourcing outcomes (typically viewed as business and process performance improvements (Lacity et al 2011)) could include strategic innovation, which opens possibilities for future studies to model and measure strategic innovation as part of outsourcing performance. Second, our study reveals that clientsupplier relationships play a major role in facilitating strategic innovation through outsourcing.…”

“…8 We attempted additional controls including industry, country and size of the company, but none of them had a significant effect on the outcomes; in order to avoid over-saturating the regression model we do not include them in further analysis. 9 In line with IS outsourcing literature, we have distinguished between IT and business process outsourcing (Lacity et al 2011, Lacity et al 2009Mani et al 2010). IT outsourcing (ITO) is defined as the sourcing of Information Technology services through an external third party (Lacity et al 2011).…”

“…9 In line with IS outsourcing literature, we have distinguished between IT and business process outsourcing (Lacity et al 2011, Lacity et al 2009Mani et al 2010). IT outsourcing (ITO) is defined as the sourcing of Information Technology services through an external third party (Lacity et al 2011). Business process outsourcing (BPO) refers to the delegation of one or more Information Technology enabled business processes to an external service provider (Mani et al 2010: 39).…”

South Africa's business process outsourcing services sector: Lessons for Western-based client firms

“…In reviewing empirical tests of these theories in the BPO context, Lacity, Solomon, Yan & Willcocks (2011) coded 615 relationships between independent and dependent variables from 87 BPO articles published between 1996 and 2011 in 67 peer-reviewed journals. For the determinants of outsourcing decisions, which can help inform the first research question, the authors found repeated empirical support that client firms use BPO to reduce total costs (transaction and production costs) as predicted by Transaction Cost Economics (e.g., Saxena & Bharadwaj, 2009), to focus on core capabilities as predicted by the Resource Based View (e.g., Mahmoodzadeh, Jalalinia, & Yazdi, 2009) and to access provider skills and expertise as predicted by Resource Dependency Theory (e.g., Lam & Chua, 2009).…”

Offshoring of Services: A Review of the Literature and Organizing Framework

“…IB scholars have dedicated special issues to the offshoring topic (Contractor et al 2010;Kenney et al 2009;Kotabe and Mudambi 2009;Lewin and Volberda 2011;Parkhe 2007) and published insightful reviews on the offshoring of value chain activities (Schmeisser 2013) and the particular governance mode of offshore outsourcing (Hätönen and Eriksson 2009). Others have limited the scope of their reviews to particular aspects of the offshoring phenomenon and grounded their works in different fields, focusing on the relocation of knowledge-intensive, higher valueadding tasks, business functions, processes, or IT-related activities (Javalgi et al 2009;Lacity et al 2010Lacity et al , 2011Rilla and Squicciarini 2011;Youngdahl and Ramaswamy 2008). Only Bunyaratavej et al (2011) limited the scope of their review to OS but they investigated articles that appeared before 2010, restricted their analysis to specific aspects of the received literature, and provided a relatively narrative appraisal of this body of research.…”