Offshoring and access to location-specific advantages - the impact of governance mode and function

Most of the existing literature aimed at predicting offshoring success and performance implications does not provide consistent performance results. We suggest that this is due to the existence of a “missing link” between of firms’ offshoring strategies and performance. In this paper, we identify how access to particular offshoring advantages may provide this link. The results of a quantitative survey of more than 1000 Scandinavian firms show that certain offshoring factors (governance mode and type of offshored function) indeed impact the access a company acquires to certain offshoring advantages, which may explain the unpredictability of previous performance outcomes.