This study investigates how home-country political connections affect the internationalization of service firms. There are conflicting arguments in the literature on the effect of political connections on firms' internationalization with some researchers arguing that political connections have a facilitating effect while others argue that they have a constraining effect. In this paper, we argue that which effect dominates largely depends on the type of firm-because of the importance of being locally responsive to customers and heterogeneity among service firms, it is difficult to transfer and utilize the benefits of home-country political connections in international markets, as they are context-specific and home-country based. We also argue that, compared to content-oriented services, process-oriented service firms face less need for customer involvement and have a greater dependency on technical skills; therefore, the negative effect of home-country political connections will be weaker in process-oriented service firms. However, marketing capabilities possessed by the firm can help firms transfer and utilize the home-grown advantages in other countries, which can positively moderate the relationship between political connections and internationalization. We test our hypotheses using data on a sample of publicly listed service firms in China from 2012 to 2016 in a dynamic panel model.

Outsourcing has become a trend for a business to pursue short-term operational efficiency and long-term strategic competency by delegating IT infrastructure, applications, and even business processes to external service providers. At the same time, new challenges are emerging along with outsourcing such as what are the right services that should be outsourced, how well these services get performed, what benefits outsourcing brings in, and so on. Thus, effective service governance and management mechanisms for both service outsourcers and service providers are essential to the success of outsourcing. However, current academic and industrial achievements cannot directly meet the requirements of governance in outsourcing. In this paper, a unified outsourcing governance framework not only for clients but also for providers is proposed, which provides a three-layer, three-perspective integrated governance model on three key dimensions of governance process, organizational structure, and measurement system. A typical call center outsourcing governance case study is illustrated to validate the framework. The future work and conclusion are discussed finally.

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