Process Perspectives on Service Offshoring
Year: 2014
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The global economy is perpetually changing to a highly knowledge-based\neconomy in which services and especially knowledge-intensive services are\nincreasingly offshored (geographically relocated) to emerging market economies\nsuch as India. This trend is interesting as for decades services had been\ncharacterized as intangible, perishable, heterogeneous and inseparable from their\nsources of origin making a geographic dispersion of service production and\nconsumption unimaginable. Thus, the geographic relocation of the services is\nexpected to infer organizational and operational reconfigurations also impacting\nthe service production. The thesis studies these reconfigurations by questioning:\nhow does offshoring impact on the production of services.\nIn order to capture the unique characteristics of services and provide a thorough\nunderstanding of the phenomenon, detailed and dynamic analyses of activities and\nactors through process perspectives are argued to be necessary. Process\nperspectives allow studying relationships between actions and individual actors\nfrom an organizational and operational angle. Two process perspectives are\napplied in this thesis in three independent research papers. The first research paper\nstudies the offshoring process as a strategic and organizational change process that\nleads to a misalignment of components of a services production system and\nquestions how this impact elicits a reconfiguration of the system.\nThe second and third paper investigates the offshored production process of\nknowledge-intensive services with a focus on actors in the processes and their\nactivities. That is, the second paper questions how the increase of cognitive\ndistance between actors inferred by offshoring changes the production of the\nservices including costs and value outcomes. The third paper questions how\noffshoring impacts client co-production, i.e. the transfer and co-creation of\nknowledge, in a similarly designed service production process of knowledgeintensive\nbusiness services. Collectively, this research shows that process\nperspectives on service offshoring are essential to study the impact of offshoring\non service production. It also allows an understanding on the importance of actors\nand the causal links between them and activities.
Source: Econstor (Econstor)
Author: Kristin Brandl
Institution: Copenhagen Business School
Language: English
Subfield: Management Information Systems
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3199169075