Business Outcomes of Outsourcing

This chapter moves from the definitional setting reported in Chapter 1 (“Outsourcing, Offshoring and the structure of the firm”) and it is logically divided into two parts. The first part draws on some previous research conducted on antecedents, processes and outcomes of outsourcing, both in general (Marchegiani et al., 2012) and applied to specific activities of the value chain (Gospel & Sako, 2010; Giustiniano et. al., 2014). The second part will instead focus on some aspects related to organizational design (i.e. company’s boundaries, coordination mechanisms) and labour issues (i.e. human reactions: “angry orphans”, hidden costs and loss of competences and competitive advantage).