Mapping the outsourcing landscape
Jakki J. Mohr, Sanjit Sengupta and Stanley F. Slater

Jakki J. Mohr is the Jeff and
Martha Hamilton
Distinguished Faculty
Fellow, Regents Professor of Marketing, at the School of Business Administration,
University of Montana,
Missoula, Montana, USA.
Sanjit Sengupta is
Professor of Marketing at the College of Business,
San Francisco State
University, San Francisco,
California, USA.
Stanley F. Slater, is the
Charles and Gwen Lillis
Professor of Business
Administration in the
Department of Marketing,
College of Business,
Colorado State University,
Fort Collins, Colorado, USA.

The authors thank Professor
Ron Premuroso for his helpful contributions to this manuscript. PAGE 42

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utsourcing is an arrangement in which one company (the client) hires another company (the service provider) to perform a particular function on its behalf. It involves the transfer of the management and/or day-to-day execution of an entire business function to an external service provider. Based on a contractual agreement that defines the transferred services and fees, the client agrees to procure the services from the supplier for the term of the contract. Outsourcing has become more global and extensive in its scope, involving more business functions and complex contractual arrangements
(Tadelis, 2007). As customer needs have evolved, so have service providers’ desire to
‘‘move up the value chain’’ and claim a larger share of the customer’s wallet. From simple information technology (IT) and business process (BP) contracts for cost savings, outsourcing arrangements now encompass research and development (R&D) and product innovation activities as well (Weeks and Feeney, 2008). These strategic outsourcing arrangements are for those processes where the service provider can compensate for some client weakness beyond