Defined as the relocation of a firm’s (in-house or outsourced) foreign activities to its home country, reshoring is a valuable strategy to reconfigure the international activities and cope with the changing international business environment. This thesis focuses on how reshoring impacts the firm’s business network and subsequent relocations. For this purpose, I conceive it as a process related to the firms' internationalization, which consists of dis-embedding activities from a host country, re-embedding them domestically, and generating a reshoring experience that shapes subsequent relocation decisions.

This thesis relies on 55 in-depth interviews and 148 survey responses. I collected and analyzed the data through a multiphase research design, sequentially combining qualitative and quantitative methods. It began with an exploratory phase reviewing extant reshoring research (Paper I) and conducting interviews on the topic. As the network dynamics emerged as central, two papers examined the impact of reshoring on the host- (Paper II) and home-country (Paper III) supplier network. The qualitative work also highlighted the role of reshoring experience in shaping subsequent relocation decisions. Consequently, I conducted a survey in the confirmatory phase to test the impact of firms’ international production and reshoring experience on subsequent reshoring, nearshoring, and further offshoring decisions (Paper IV).

The findings display a number of challenges and opportunities presented to firms during the reshoring process, particularly when dis-embedding the activities from the host country and re-embedding them domestically. These mainly relate to the termination and evolution of business relationships with foreign suppliers and the development of new ones with those in the home country. Furthermore, the findings reveal a path dependence between reshoring experience and subsequent reshoring decisions, which are positively related, although reshoring experience does not affect nearshoring and further offshoring decisions. 

This thesis contributes to the reshoring and internationalization literature in three main ways. First, it develops a network and experiential learning view of the reshoring process, untangling how these elements play out in relocations to the home country. Second, it conceives reshoring as a commitment process related to firms' internationalization. In so doing, it shows how some of the central elements explaining international expansion (e.g., relationship commitment and experience) evolve in the reshoring process and the interplay of the home country context with the evolution of commitment in a host country. Third, it advances the concept of a reshoring capability, which has important implications for subsequent reshoring decisions.