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Exploring the reshoring and insourcing decision making process: toward an agenda for future research

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Abstract

The topics of reshoring and insourcing have recently become more widely discussed among operations management and international business scholars and managers, as some firms are revoking their offshoring and outsourcing decisions. This research focuses on and clarifies the decision making processes related to the two distinct, yet closely related phenomena of reshoring and insourcing. It presents a conceptual framework of all theoretically possible reshoring and insourcing decisions, illustrated in its applicability by a review of the United States and German business press. Then four future research avenues are developed as part of an overall decision making framework together with an overview of specific research questions for this emergent field. Further research avenues include the need to differentiate between reshoring/insourcing as strategic direction or reaction to failure, studying organizational readiness in addition to decision drivers, improve coverage of the implementation stage and explore further contingency factors such as technological advancement as well as to focus on decision makers as the unit of analysis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Supply Chain & Operations Management, University of Applied Sciences Mainz - School of Business, Lucy Hillebrand Str. 2, 55128, Mainz, Germany

    Lydia Bals

  2. Department of Strategic Management & Globalization, Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Lydia Bals

  3. Department of Marketing and Supply Chain Management, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, USA

    Jon F. Kirchoff

  4. Chair of Supply Chain Management & Logistics, German Graduate School of Management & Law (GGS), Bildungscampus 2, 74076, Heilbronn, Germany

    Kai Foerstl

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  1. Lydia Bals
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Correspondence to Lydia Bals.

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Bals, L., Kirchoff, J.F. & Foerstl, K. Exploring the reshoring and insourcing decision making process: toward an agenda for future research. Oper Manag Res 9, 102–116 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12063-016-0113-0

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