A network perspective on the reshoring process: The relevance of the home- and the host-country contexts

Current research on reshoring explains why a company brings its previously offshored activities back home mainly from the host country perspective. The study emphases the relevance of the home-country context. Specifically, from the IMP (Industrial Marketing & Purchasing) perspective, the study shows how offshoring and reshoring processes and decisions are both enabled and constrained by the micro-interactions and inter-dependencies in the industrial networks involving the home-country and the host-country. The study develops a model based on a longitudinal case study of an Italian manufacturing firm. Based on this model, the study explains the process of the offshoring/reshoring is a longitudinal process embracing several decisions and contingent upon the focal firm's strategy and its interplay with the embedding networks. The study contributes to the literature on reshoring and global factory, as well as to the concept of “selective reshoring” (i.e., companies bring back a very specific sub-set of their offshore activities that were previously fine-sliced, and then re-embed these activities in their local home context). The flexible and selective nature of this relocation between different supply markets depend on the firm's strategy and the structure, overlap and evolution of the network elements located in the home- and host-country contexts.