OPDO - Organizational Design Perspectives on Offshoring

The Conferencen takes place from 27th - 28th October 2011Offshoring—or the geographical relocation of disaggregated firm value chain activities in captive, collaborative or outsourced governance modes—is increasingly gaining popularity among practitioners as a competitive practice and academics as a research phenomenon. Driven by an array of different motives, including costs, resources and markets, offshoring has indeed reached unprecedented levels in recent years. This is particularly manifested in the surge in offshoring of knowledge intensive activities such as research and development to emerging economies. Accordingly, the offshoring phenomenon has been scrutinized extensively in international business literature on topics regarding its antecedents, the processes, and the outcomes.

This workshop intends to further our knowledge on a specific offshoring subfield, namely the organizational design of offshoring. We believe that existing organizational design theories are largely under-utilized in studying the offshoring phenomenon. At the same time, it offers a highly fertile research grounds to test and challenge many existing assumptions underlying these theories.