Cluster capabilities or ethnic ties? Location choice by foreign and domestic entrants in the services offshoring industry in India

A comparison of location factors evaluation in the secondary and tertiary sectors

“…Generally speaking, the location factors of industries and business services are largely infl uenced by modern technologies which have changed the importance of these location factors. Especially in the tertiary sector, the proximity to customers is not so important anymore [44] and, also, this factor can be now considered as consistently rated within the two studied sectors. It should also be noted that both sectors play the key role in the development of the region and in the regional economic growth, [8], [2], [11], [26] which often corresponds with the cultural dimensions, infrastructure [38] and other location factors.…”

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

“…International Business Review 7 (9 %) 1 (5 %) 4 (11 %) 2 (9 %) (Jandhyala 2013;Vivek et al 2009;Zaheer et al 2009). While Asia as a recipient of OS relocations has continued to attract most of the scholarly work, the literature also contains several studies that examine OS practices involving subsidiaries and providers located outside this region (Demirbag and Glaister 2010;Jensen and Petersen 2013).…”

“…Conventional wisdom as well as extensive research confirm that recent progresses in ICT have been a crucial antecedent of the OS phenomenon as they have relaxed this constraint by allowing companies to decouple the production and consumption of service activities and thus splinter them in a geographically dispersed value chain (Apte and Mason 1995;Bunyaratavej et al 2008;Doh 2005;Dossani and Kenney 2007;Grote and Täube 2007;Jandhyala 2013;Murray and Kotabe 1999;UNCTAD 2004;Zaheer et al 2009). Such advances have also increased the possibility of standardizing and storing services' outputs, further enlarging the scope of services that firms could relocate abroad successfully (Di Gregorio et al 2009;Doh et al 2009;Jandhyala 2013).…”

Leveraging India: Global Interconnectedness and Locational Competitive Advantage

“…They further note that while overseas Indians have helped boost exports of knowledge-based services, overseas Chinese have done so in labor-intensive manufactured products. Zaheer et al (2009) studying eleven city clusters in India for services offshoring, found that ethnic networks exert greater influence on location decisions than cluster capabilities and externalities-and that this was more true for Indian, as opposed to foreign companies. Other academic studies on the role of diasporas in international business are relatively few and not necessarily focused on India.…”

“…Family control, in an emerging country context, can have advantages over professionally run organizations, by the ability to make quicker decisions, willingness to be patient or take a long-term strategic view (Serrasqueiro et al 2012). Families in emerging nations including India are very large or extended and their social or informal networks can reach across states and national borders, yielding a rich crop of ideas, insights and capital (Zaheer et al 2009;Ahlstrom et al 2007;Luo 2003). Of course, the entrepreneurship literature (e.g., Carlock and Ward 2010) also suggests disadvantages of family-held businesses.…”