Title: Manufacturing relocation abroad and back: empirical evidence from the Nordic countries

Authors: Jussi Heikkilä; Sanna Nenonen; Jan Olhager; Jan Stentoft

Addresses: Industrial and Information Management, Tampere University of Technology, P.O. Box 527, FI-33101 Tampere, Finland ' Industrial and Information Management, Tampere University of Technology, P.O. Box 527, FI-33101 Tampere, Finland ' Industrial Management and Logistics, Lund University, Box 118, SE-22100 Lund, Sweden ' Entrepreneurship and Relationship Management, University of Southern Denmark, DK-6000 Kolding, Denmark

Abstract: Businesses have increasingly engaged in various forms of cross-border transfers of activities. Much production, knowledge and work has been moved offshore from developed economies to achieve better competitiveness. However, recent research has begun to report about an opposite movement, i.e., backshoring of business activities. This research paper reports empirical survey results, exploring and explaining manufacturing relocation from and to three Nordic countries. The purpose was to investigate manufacturing firms' practices of pursuing different manufacturing globalisation strategies in terms of why, what types of companies, and where questions, and in the context of manufacturing relocation activities originating from Denmark, Finland, and Sweden. Both offshoring and backshoring of manufacturing are also analysed from the perspective of changes in ownership, i.e., the extent to which outsourcing or insourcing are related to manufacturing relocation.

Keywords: manufacturing; offshoring; outsourcing; backshoring; insourcing; reshoring; relocation; rightshoring; survey; Nordic countries; production.

DOI: 10.1504/WRITR.2018.093563

World Review of Intermodal Transportation Research, 2018 Vol.7 No.3, pp.221 - 240

Received: 26 Sep 2017
Accepted: 27 Feb 2018
Published online: 27 Jul 2018 *

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