Despite the amount of literature on the antecedents and outcomes of IT outsourcing, the vast majority of this research has focused on factors at the firm level. Environmental factors such as industry and country characteristics have received little attention. Environmental factors should be taken into account in IT outsourcing research because firms are open systems and their behaviors are significantly influenced by material-resource and institutional environments. Moreover, previous research at the firm level has not evaluated the effectiveness of IT outsourcing and insourcing in terms of how they create value for firms. To address the paucity of macro-level research in IT outsourcing as well as to augment our knowledge at the firm level, this thesis investigates IT outsourcing issues at three levels, namely, at the firm, industry, and country level. More specifically, I expand firm-level research by jointly examining the impacts of IT outsourcing and insourcing on IT-enabled organizational capabilities and firm performance (Essay #1). I also investigate the roles of industry-level factors such as munificence, dynamism, concentration, and capital intensity (Essay #2) and country-level variables such as the maturity of the IT-related legal system, generalized trust, uncertainty avoidance, Internet penetration, and the maturity of the IT outsourcing market of a country (Essay #3) in the diffusion of IT outsourcing practice.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.115614 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Qu, Wen Guang. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Desautels Faculty of Management.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 003135124, proquestno: AAINR66566, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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