A Theoretical Approach to Netsourcing Research

NetSourcing has recently gained some importance in the IS literature. However, although the customer side of Netsourcing has drawn a lot of interest, its supply-side remains under-researched. One of the challenges faced by Netsourcing vendors is the difficulty in sourcing the components of the infrastructure on which they rely. This paper proposes to investigate the sourcing strategies used by Netsourcing vendors in order to access the different infrastructural components. The paper uses Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) and the Resource-based View (RBV) to predict in order to predict the possible sourcing modes for each component. However, when trying to validate these using a series of cases studies, the outcome was that an important part of the predictions were not verified. The author concluded that although TCE and RBV are important theories for IS research, their combination has the potential to yield even stronger results.