Strategy: Theory and Practice
Journal Articles
Select SAGE journal articles are available to give you more insight into chapter topics. These are also an ideal resource to help support your literature reviews, dissertations and assignments.
Click on the following links, which will open in a new window.
Often, driving the countries freeways, motorways, autostrada and autobahns, you will pass or be passed by trucks bearing a haulier’s identity; other times they will wear the logo and livery of the company whose goods are being distributed. Like us, you probably have never given much thought to why goods should be trucked in one or the other but Daifeng He and Jack A. Nickerson (2006) have. In a really interesting journal article they ask the basic question ‘Why do firms make and buy?’ which they answer by looking at ‘Efficiency, appropriability and competition in the trucking industry’. One element of their answer is that it is not necessarily an either or answer: firms can pursue concurrent strategies.
An outsourcing provider typically bases outsourcing decisions on the potential to realize cost savings through economies of scale and specialization. Markets with significant scale economies frequently generate concentrated market structures with a dominant outsourcing supplier. These markets are less attractive for the outsourcing client due to the loss of bargaining power that they enjoy vis-à-vis the concentrated domination. Using a simple analytical model, Achim Hecker and Tobias Kretschmer derive implications for empirical work and formalize some of the practitioner literature on outsourcing in this article.