Global sourcing strategy and sustainable competitive advantage

By Masaaki Kotabe, Janet Murray. Industrial Marketing Management, 2003

417 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Global sourcing strategy has been one of the most hotly debated management trends in the last 20 years. In its early years, global sourcing was examined mostly from “in-house” development and procurement perspectives; and in the last several years, research focus has shifted to “outsourcing” activities. Along with this shift from internal to external focus on global sourcing, many researchers and business practitioners have applied a core competency argument to justify increased levels of outsourcing activities on a global basis. Although the beneficial aspects of outsourcing are assumed in most cases, no consensus exists in reality as to the effect of outsourcing. Furthermore, the increased instability of the exchange rate environment in the last several years has also led to increased difficulties in managing globally scattered operations that were once fashionable in the 1980s-90s under the rubric of global strategy. In this article, the authors explore potential limitations and negative consequences of outsourcing strategy on a global scale.

Subfields: Management Information Systems, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/033c8dcc3b7642a79cc254796ab12a1388986e85

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In Management Information Systems

In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Global Purchasing Strategy: Conceptualization and Measurement (2006, background): “For instance, Kotabe and Murray (2004) indicate that global sourcing strategy may optimize competitive advantages of the company and its suppliers as well as location advantages of countries.”
Impact of supply base structural complexity on financial performance: Roles of visible and not‐so‐visible characteristics (2017, background): “Last but not least, from the core competency perspective (Prahalad and Hamel, 1990; Kotabe and Murray, 2004), offshore sourcing frees up organizational resources for emerging needs or to develop important firm capabilities (Hamel et al., 1989).”
30+ years of research and practice of outsourcing – Exploring the past and anticipating the future (2009, neutral): “…recently identified several questions regarding offshore outsourcing that still remain under-researched; the main issue being making the location decision for outsourced activities, that is, where to outsource (Bunyaratavej et al., 2007; Doh, 2005; Graf and Mudambi, 2005; Kotabe and Murray, 2004).”
MNC Strategies and Linkage Effects in Developing Countries (2009, background): “The surge in global sourcing and global integration within the multinational corporation is widely described by IB scholars, see e.g. Zaheer & Manrakhan (2001), Dicken (2003) and Kotabe & Murray (2004).”
Cross-functional integration and functional coordination in purchasing and supply management: Antecedents and effects on purchasing and firm performance (2013, background): “2 Functional coordination and purchasing performance We define coordination within the PSM function or functional coordination in short, as the common management of processes, products and services, and suppliers across the worldwide purchasing organization (Kotabe and Murray, 2004; Trent and Monczk”
Outsourcing to emerging markets: Theoretical perspectives and policy implications (2009, background): “Sourcing refers to identifying which production units will serve which markets, and where will they get the components or processes required for production (Kotabe and Murray, 2004; Davidson, 1982; Kotabe, 1993; Swamidass and Kotabe, 1993).”
Purchasing strategy development: A multi-level review (2015, background): “Except for Kraljic (1977), early publications primarily focus on the link between firm-level strategy and purchasing's functional strategy (e.”
What goes around, comes around: Effects of offshore outsourcing on the export performance of firms (2011, background): “Intra-firm sourcing should improve the firm’s performance (Kotabe & Murray, 2004).”
Global purchasing: state of the art and research directions (2006, background): “Recently, scholars have pled univocally for more and more rigorous research on global purchasing (e.g., Kotabe and Murray, 2004; Mol et al., 2004; Quintens et al., 2006).”