30+ years of research and practice of outsourcing – Exploring the past and anticipating the future

Outsourcing is a phenomenon that as a practice originated in the 1950s, but it was not until the 1980s when the strategy became widely adopted in organizations. Since then, the strategy has evolved from a strictly cost focused approach towards more cooperative nature, in which cost is only one, often secondary, decision-making criterion. In the development of the strategy, three broad and somewhat overlapping, yet distinct phases can be...