Is offshoring dead? A multidisciplinary review and future directions

Offshoring has represented a dominant business practice in the past three decades, prompting considerable research across multiple business domains to understand its various facets. By applying bibliometric techniques (Donthu et al., 2021), the authors of the current article aim to take stock of this rich, multidisciplinary literature. With performance analysis, author network analysis, bibliographic coupling, and topic trend analysis, they identify its underlying intellectual structure and map its temporal, spatial, and thematic evolution. The analysis of 111 key journals and 668 articles, spanning more than three decades (1989–2022) comprises four distinct time periods and longitudinal trends that support meaningful visual representations of the bibliographic data. The findings reveal six foundational themes for offshoring research: (1) offshoring and global supply chains, (2) offshoring of IT/business processes, (3) outcomes of offshoring, (4) governance mechanisms in offshoring and success strategies, (5) drivers of offshoring, and (6) backshoring of manufacturing. Based on the temporal and topic trend analysis, this article concludes with recommendations for broad further research avenues that can shed light on the future of offshoring in the post-pandemic world.