Organizational Reconfiguration and Strategic Response: The Case of Offshoring

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of the organizational reconfiguration of offshoring on firms’ strategies. A consequence of offshoring is the need to reintegrate the geographically relocated organizational activities into a coherent organizational architecture. In order to do this, firms need a high degree of architectural knowledge, which is typically gained through learning by doing. We therefore argue that firms with more offshoring experience are more likely to include organizational objectives in their offshoring strategies. We develop and find support for this hypothesis using a mixed-method approach based on a qualitative case study and comprehensive data from the Offshoring Research Network. These findings contribute to research on the organizational design and architecture of offshoring and the dynamics of organizational architectures.