Manufacturing back-reshoring-an exploratory approach for hypotheses development

Over the past years, use of the terms like “on-shoring”,“re-shoring” and “back-shoring” has multiplied dramatically, especially in economics journalism and in consulting firms’ white papers. More recently, the topic has also attracted academic attention. Notwithstanding this increasing attention, reliable and quantitative evidence on the extent of the back-shoring phenomenon is scanty and often of anecdotal nature. Moreover, definition and characterization of such a phenomenon are still not definitive. In this paper, we focus our attention on the theoretical conceptualization of the back-reshoring phenomenon and summarize the base of knowledge currently available. At the same time, we formulate an operative definition of the investigated phenomenon within a comprehensive theoretical framework. We also define a set of research proposals to be analysed in future research, on the basis of both, a literature review and preliminary evidence provided by our dataset “Uni-CLUB MoRe Back-reshoring”, developed as part of a research project jointly undertaken by scholars belonging to the Universities of Catania, L’Aquila, Udine, Bologna and Reggio Emilia.