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The implemented European Union Services Directive aimed at creating a unified European market for trade in services. However, the implementation of the institutions was not fully successful as to the characteristics of international services caused challenges in the ratification of the Directive. Research on international services is facing similar challenges based on the fragmented, inconclusive, and at times even contradictory findings of international services literature with regard to service characteristics. Thus, each academic field of international business, economic geography, and service management has tried to identify international service characteristics, but no unified characterization is found. The challenges in defining the different types of services, difference in the levels of analysis, and various impacts of policies and institutional environments on the service, cause these differences. The authors see the need for a unified framework that combines the different literatures and considers the policy implications. The authors develop a framework consisting of four components of international service characteristics, that is, the connectivity of service actors to the environment, the configuration of service activities within organizational set-ups, the dyadic collaborative interaction between service actors, and the created value by the services. The authors specifically consider policy and institutions as well as a vast variety of literature streams to support the arguments.

Purpose – The purpose of the chapter is to analyze the factors that lead firms to offshore advanced tasks.

Methodology/approach – The study uses a 1,500-firm survey from Denmark to investigate the offshoring of 12 tradable manufacturing, technical, and service activities across different industries.

Findings – Findings indicate that offshoring of advanced tasks is driven by a different set of strategic motives than previous waves of offshoring, which predominantly included simple and standardized routine tasks. While the lower cost of unskilled, labor-intensive processes is the incentive for firms that offshore less advanced tasks, a desire to broaden and deepen global networks of new knowledge spurs highly knowledge-intensive companies to offshore more advanced tasks.

Originality/value of chapter – We propose that offshoring should be analyzed on a more disaggregated level of analysis than is the norm in mainstream offshoring literature. To reflect the trend whereby firms are “slicing” their value chain in finer and finer parts and locate these in various locations around the world, offshoring should be analyzed at the task level, since this paves the way for a richer understanding of offshoring strategies and processes.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of offshoring and inshoring on the demand for different types of labor.

The paper uses a survey with 1,500 firms located in the Eastern part of Denmark to identify overall offshoring and inshoring trends. Estimates of the employment impact are founded on data from a sub‐sample of firms with offshoring and/or inshoring.

The paper shows that in the period 2002‐2005 more jobs were created as a result of inshoring of activities into Eastern Denmark from firms outside Denmark than were eliminated due to offshoring from firms in the Danish region. Overall, highly skilled workers reap the benefits of offshoring and inshoring, whereas the positions of low‐skilled workers are challenged.

In contrast to most academic research on offshoring, which predominantly focus on outward offshoring flows, the study analyzes both outward and inward offshoring (inshoring) and gives a more holistic and balanced view on the magnitude and employment impact.

While mainstream theories in international business and management are foundedeither explicitly or implicitly on studies of manufacturing firms, prior attempts to develop theoryon the internationalization of service firms are sparse and have yet to establish solid andcomprehensive frameworks. The thrust of this study is that value creation logics, a constructoriginally developed by Stabell and Fjeldstad (1998) can assist us in better understanding why and how service firms internationalize. The authors extend this construct and propose that the internationalization of service firms must be based on a thorough understanding of the fundamental nature of these firms.

Theoretical study.

The authors put forward propositions concerning the pace of internationalization and the default foreign operation modes in service firms.

The use of value creation logics can be a useful complement to the conventional approaches to the study of service firms’ internationalization. However, the fact that most firms encompass more than one value creation logic complicates the use of firm databases and industry statistics.

The authors suggest that managers in service firms should consider primarily the nature of the value creation logic(s) in their firms when deciding and designing an internationalization strategy.

The study presents a novel theoretical approach and a set of propositions on service firm internationalization founded on the specific characteristics of the service activities.

This volume of Progress in International Business Research includes a selection of 13 papers from the 35th European International Business Academy (EIBA) annual conference, which was held in Valencia (Spain) from the 13 to the 15 of December 2009. Following the usual guidelines for EIBA annual conference organization, papers submitted to this conference had a double-blind revision process. The acceptance rate for oral presentations was 68%.

What counts as evidence of good performance, behaviour or character? While quantitative metrics have long been used to measure performance and productivity in schools, factories and workplaces, what is striking today is the extent to which these calculative methods and rationalities are being extended into new areas of life through the global spread of performance indicators (PIs) and performance management systems. What began as part of the neoliberalising projects of the 1980s with a few strategically chosen PIs to give greater state control over the public sector through contract management and mobilising ‘users’ has now proliferated to include almost every aspect of professional work. The use of metrics has also expanded from managing professionals to controlling entire populations. This chapter focuses on the rise of these new forms of audit and their effects in two areas: first, the alliance being formed between state-collected data and that collected by commercial companies on their customers through, for example loyalty cards and credit checks. Second, China’s new social credit system, which allocates individual scores to each citizen and uses rewards of better or privileged service to entice people to volunteer information about themselves, publish their ‘ratings’ and compete with friends for status points. This is a new development in the use of audit simultaneously to discipline whole populations and responsibilise individuals to perform according to new state and commercial norms about the reliable/conforming ‘good’ citizen.