Reshoring: A review and research agenda

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Introduction
Offshoring of value chain activities to foreign countries has attracted for quite a long-time considerable interest of scholars in different fields, from operations and supply-chain management to international business (e.g., Doh, 2005;Lewin & Peeters, 2006;McIvor, 2013;Mukherjee et al., 2023).Framed as the relocation of value chain activities from the firm's country of origin to foreign locations (Schmeisser, 2013), offshoring, both as outsourcing and foreign direct investments, has often been associated to strategies pursuing cost savings, increased revenues, asset seeking and flexibility.Offshoring decisions are supposedly based on obtaining disintegration advantages, i.e., the practice of fine-slicing activities and transferring them to different countries, coupled with the exploitation of the potential advantages' different location may offer (Kedia & Mukherjee, 2009).At last, the choice between externalization, i.e., outsourcing, and captive offshoring is complementing the offshoring strategy decision; the externalization would be typically preferred if there are available specialized suppliers that may provide higher value creation than the firm would generate, especially true for activities that are not part of the firm core business (e.g., Buckley, 2009;Mukherjee et al., 2013).
However, in more recent years, researchers have detected a number of firms that have reconsidered their previous offshoring decisions and relocated value chain activities, particularly production, back to their home country or region, which is referred to as reshoring (Ellram, 2013;Manning, 2014).The decision to re-shore is shown to be increasingly popular in both Europe and the US (European Reshoring Monitor, 2018;Moser, 2019), with firms reversing their prior decision to offshore and engaging in reshoring for multiple reasons, ranging from performance shortcomings in the host country (Kinkel & Maloca, 2009), to strategic shifts (Bals et al., 2016) and changes in the external environment (Martínez-Mora & Merino, 2014).In other words, as reshoring is tightly linked with the previous offshoring decisions, when potential benefits of offshoring such as favorable environment, learning opportunities, efficiency and flexibility (e.g., Mukherjee et al., 2013Mukherjee et al., , 2019) ) are deteriorating, firms may start evaluating the option of bringing back operations to their home country or region in order for instance to increase control, offset location problems, or even obtain potential new benefits from new policies targeting reshoring (e.g., Pegoraro et al., 2022).
Moreover, in light of recent global events such as trade wars, armed conflicts and the pandemic, but also rising nationalism and the spike in logistics costs, reshoring decisions may gain further momentum, not only as reactive strategies to address performance shortcomings or problems in the offshore operations, but also as preventive strategies to increase supply chain resilience and avoid potential disruptions (Barbieri et al., 2020;Gereffi, 2020).Therefore, reshoring of activities to own domestic or regional markets may result an attractive option for firms addressing existing or potential vulnerabilities within their global supply chain (Barbieri et al., 2020).
Multiple reviews have been published on reshoring, spanning from studies covering the drivers and barriers behind the decision to repatriate or single elements guiding relocation initiatives (Fratocchi et al., 2016;Wiesmann et al., 2017), such as digital innovation and sustainability (Ashby, 2016;Cosimato & Vona, 2021;Fratocchi & Di Stefano, 2019b), to the review of studies conducted with a specific methodological approach (Boffelli & Johansson, 2020) or in specific industries (Fratocchi & Di Stefano, 2019a;Pal et al., 2018).However, to date only one available study scrutinized literature on the phenomenon in its entirety (Barbieri et al., 2018), although based only on 57 papers and thus excluding the vast body that has emerged since early 2017 (see Fig. 1).Moreover, the Barbieri et al. (2018) study, relying on a qualitative approach, adopted a specific framework for their categorization of the reshoring research (i.e., the What, Who, Why, How, Where, When), which was ex-ante and subjectively pre-set.
The growing body of literature has laid the foundations and made essential contributions to reshoring research, which is however far from exhaustive and dealing with a highly dynamic phenomenon, especially considering the recent changes in the global business scenario.Therefore, the aim of this paper is to offer a timely snapshot and fully capture with an explorative intent the development of reshoring research.Specifically, we intend to answer three questions: Which are the main contributions to reshoring research?What are the key themes and emerging streams in this research area?How can future research advance knowledge on the topic?
This study builds on a dataset of 135 articles retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases, merged with the Bibliometrix package in R. Using the same software, the most influential papers, journals, authors, and institutions are identified conducting bibliometric performance analysis, while thematic mapping and bibliographic coupling are used to reveal the conceptual structure of this body of research and its emerging streams.The results of these bibliometric techniques are then combined with content analysis.From this analysis, we present a framework, marked by (i) antecedents, (ii) contingencies, (iii) decision, (iv) implementation, and (v) outcome to organize and discuss existing research but, most importantly, to signal blind spots that, if addressed, can advance the understanding of reshoring.
This study makes significant contributions to both theory and practice.First, we provide a comprehensive and timely review of a body of literature that has seen a surge of scholarly interest, as evidenced by Fig. 1.Unpacking the knowledge map and clusters of reshoring research, we present the state of the field, highlight theoretical concepts used to explain reshoring, and reveal the connections among them (Mukherjee et al., 2022).In particular, we identify the key research streams on the topic and its new emerging elements, such as fears of future supply chain disruptions and sustainability concerns (Ashby, 2016;Barbieri et al., 2020;Gupta et al., 2021).Second, on the basis of our analysis, we develop a reshoring framework composed of five thematic areas.This is fundamental to gain a complete picture of the nature of reshoring and, by indicating crucial gaps in the literature, opens up new questions that are critical for advancing the theorizing on the topic.Third, this is the first bibliometric study on reshoring and contributes on a methodological level, ensuring extensive coverage of published research within both WoS and Scoups datasets, and complementing previous qualitative reviews on the topic by clarifying the nomological networks of the field (Mukherjee et al., 2022).Finally, we inform practice by unpacking the complexity of the reshoring process, shifting focus from only on its triggers to what actually happens after the relocation decision is made.This is important for both managers evaluating reshoring possibilities and policy makers interested to support reshoring firms.Specifically, this more comprehensive approach outlines a number of process-related elements that managers and policy actors need to account for when planning reshoring decisions and evaluating their outcomes, such as key contingencies and implementation factors as well as process-and firmlevel effects.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows.The next section presents the methodological approach adopted, before moving to the results of bibliometric performance analysis, conceptual thematic mapping, and bibliographic coupling.Thereafter, combining the results of bibliometric and content analyses, a reshoring conceptual framework is introduced, to organize current literature and develop an exhaustive but precise research agenda supporting further advancements in our understanding of the reshoring phenomenon.

Methodology
To enhance the understanding of a topic and serve as baseline for future research, review papers identify and critically evaluate a body of literature, adopting approaches that range from more qualitative to more quantitative (Paul & Criado, 2020;Snyder, 2019).To answer its research questions, this paper adopts two complementary techniques, namely bibliometric and content analyses (Duriau et al., 2007;Zupic & Čater, 2015).Bibliometric analysis methods (i.e., bibliometric performance analysis, conceptual thematic mapping, and bibliographic coupling) are used to answer the first two research questions, thus identifying the most relevant contributions to reshoring research, but most importantly its thematic structure and emerging streams (Donthu et al., 2021).At the same time, a deeper qualitative understanding of the material is gained by content analyzing the 135 articles (Duriau et al., 2007;Gaur & Kumar, 2018), whose insights, combined with those of bibliometric analysis, are employed to develop a reshoring process framework connecting different aspects of the phenomenon and indicating unexplored conceptual areas, thus answering the third and last research question.
Fig. 2 illustrates the research methodology and workflow followed in this study, with description of data search, collection techniques, and methods of analysis that are thoroughly described thereafter.

Data search and collection
This study has followed a rigorous search technique in the formation of its data sample (Brocke, 2009), based on a four-stage process (see Appendix A).First of all, in September 2022 a boolean search using the keywords "Reshor*" OR "Re-shor*" OR "Backshor*" OR "Back-shor*" OR "Nearshor*" OR "Near-shor*" has been conducted on WoS and Scopus, the two major databases of academic literature (Zupic & Čater, 2015).The keywords set was purposefully limited to terminology strictly pertaining to reshoring (Fratocchi et al., 2014), avoiding the inclusion of general terms such as location, relocation, entry or exit, which would have generated a massive number of entries from unrelated phenomena.This first search, aimed at identifying papers with corresponding terms in either their title, abstract or keywords, produced a total of 20,041 results in WoS and 27,534 in Scopus.
The second step consisted of filtering the results based on three general criteria: the language is English; the document type corresponds to either article or review article; and the subject area is related to business or operations management.Applying these filters, the search  (Mongeon & Paul-Hus, 2016;Zupic & Čater, 2015).This enabled a substantial reduction in the number of papers, primarily resulting from the exclusion of papers in irrelevant areas such as environmental science, oceanography, and geology, where "shore and shoring" are terms frequently employed with reference to coasts.
Third, and most importantly, a critical qualitative assessment of the articles resulting from the database search has been conductedreading their title, abstract, keywords and, where necessary, full contentto assure that only those thoroughly focused on the topic were included.This has led to the exclusion of papers only marginally touching on the topic, such as those treating the relocation of production within the same country (e.g., Yang et al., 2018), instances of re-organization of production within a single in loco facility (e.g., Venkatadri et al., 2017;Yegul et al., 2017), or nearshoring as a form of proximity offshoring (e. g., Bock, 2008;Roza et al., 2011).After the exclusion of the irrelevant articles, WoS counted 103 papers and Scopus 124.
Finally, the fourth and last step involved the merger of the two datasets obtained from WoS and Scopus, with removal of duplicates.This was accomplished using the Bibliometrix package in R (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017), which enabled the merger of data retrieved from the two databases, with deletion of 92 duplicates and formation of a final sample of 135 articles.

Data analysis
Assuming similar pieces in a field build on each other (Appio et al., 2014) and defined as "the research field that analyzes bibliographic data with quantitative methods" (Broadus, 1987), bibliometric analysis provides a rigorous picture of data belonging to a specific body of literature (Donthu et al., 2021).To answer its research questions, this article adopts three main bibliometric techniques: bibliometric performance analysis, conceptual thematic mapping, and bibliographic coupling (Bretas & Alon, 2021;Donthu et al., 2021;Zupic & Čater, 2015).
Bibliometric performance analysis addresses the first research question, presenting the most relevant contributions to reshoring research in terms of articles, journals, authors, and institutions (Donthu et al., 2021).
The second research question is answered relying on conceptual thematic mapping and bibliographic coupling.In particular, conceptual thematic mapping is conducted to single out and present a map of the key themes in reshoring literature, distributed along the two axes of density and centrality (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017;Bretas & Alon, 2021;Zupic & Čater, 2015).Density refers to the strength of ties between keywords within the single theme, providing a measure of their internal associations, calculated as: d = 100 ( ∑ e ij /w), where i and j represent keywords belonging to the cluster, e ij their tie strength, and w the total number of keywords in the cluster (Cobo et al., 2011;Kumar et al., 2021).Centrality captures instead the strength of the ties of a theme with other external themes, indicating the degree of external association and hence the relevance of the theme in the development of the body of literature analyzed (Grivel et al., 1995;Kumar et al., 2021), measured as: c = 10 × ∑ e kh , with k representing a keyword belonging to the theme, h a keyword belonging to other themes, and e kh their tie strength (Cobo et al., 2011;Kumar et al., 2021).This technique assumes that appearance of certain words across documents may signal their relatedness on a conceptual level, and we defined author keywords as unit of analysis as they are generally selected by authors to express the central themes in their work (Pandey et al., 2022).
To further the understanding of relevant topics that are currently of interest to researchers in the field, thematic mapping is complemented by bibliographic coupling.This technique works on the assumption that two papers sharing the same references must have similarities in themes and topics, as they build on the same knowledge base (Donthu et al., 2021;Zupic & Čater, 2015), and can be fruitfully combined with keywords thematic mapping.Bibliographic coupling can indeed be very effective in identifying topics that are not only overall relevant but also currently of interest to researchers, focusing more on the latest developments characterizing it (Pandey et al., 2022).This is also the reason for the choice of this technique over others, such as co-citation analysis, which is commonly used to trace the foundational themes in a field (Donthu et al., 2021), but would tell little about the emerging streams and leave out articles that have not yet appeared in reference lists (Pandey et al., 2022); this latter could be a major issue considering the recency of reshoring research and thus our preference for bibliographic coupling.
Finally, to achieve a deeper understanding of the literature, identifying its trending topics as well as blind spots, bibliometric methods are complemented by qualitative content analysis (Duriau et al., 2007;Gaur & Kumar, 2018) to address the third research question, and thus develop the reshoring process framework and proposed research agenda.The qualitative content analysis has been performed on all 135 articles, to better grasp and interpret the results of bibliometric analysis, and to determine the specific focus and approach adopted in each article.
To enable the handling of a merged dataset from WoS and Scopus, this study relies on the Bibliometrix package in R for both bibliometric analysis and presentation (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017).Despite other software have been more popular and have often complemented similar studies (e.g., HistCite, VOSviewer), considering their visualization abilities, the decision to rely exclusively on this software is motivated by the need to capture and examine as much available literature as possible, due to its recency and fast development.

Bibliometric analysis
The sample analyzed (outlined in Table 1) comprises 135 articles, published between 2009 and 2022, signaling a limited but fast-growing amount of literature on the topic.In particular, despite the first article was published in 2009, it is only starting in 2013 that reshoring research gained traction.Moreover, the relevance and fast development of this body of literature can be evinced also by looking at the high average total citations per article, the count of citations received by each paper, which doesn't necessarily indicate quality of research but unambiguously reflects scholarly interest in the topic.

Performance analysis
Bibliometric performance analysis is here employed to provide a picture of the most important contributions to reshoring research, presenting the most relevant articles, journals, authors and institutions.Table 2 reports the most impactful studies on reshoring, ranked by yearly average local citation (LC/t), namely the number of times each paper has been cited by the others in the sample, and expressing their support to the development of this literature.The most impactful paper develops an organizing framework for the motivations driving the reshoring decision (Fratocchi et al., 2016), and the one following consists of a conceptual work clarifying the characteristics and boundaries of various relocation initiatives, proposing clear definitions for each of them (Fratocchi et al., 2014).Furthermore, Ellram et al. (2013) investigate the location factors affecting firms' perception of the attractiveness of different regions for reshoring initiatives, while the piece by Wiesmann et al. (2017) reviews literature on the drivers and barriers of reshoring, and the main theoretical perspectives applied to the phenomenon until then.
This body of research is interdisciplinary and has been published in outlets belonging to different fields, with an evident prominence of sources belonging to the operations and supply chain management, complemented by general management and international business outlets.As shown in Most research on the topic has been conducted by researchers affiliated to universities located in few countries and regions.In fact, as shown by Table 5, among the 20 most prolific institutions, seven are located in Italy and eight in Scandinavian countries, accounting for a vast majority of scientific production on the topic.Furthermore, what stands out is not only the lack of research on the topic in Asia, which is often the region from where activities are relocated, but most importantly its paucity in the US, notwithstanding evidence of increasing reshoring initiatives to the country (Moser, 2019).Thus, research on the topic has been concentrated in very specific regions, and its results may be characterized by an inherent geographical bias.

Conceptual thematic map
To reveal the conceptual structure of the field, thematic mapping is employed to present the relevance of different topics in reshoring research (Fig. 3).This is accomplished analyzing the relationships among author keywords, and reporting them in a thematic map of clusters distributed along the two axes of density and centrality previously discussed.The resulting map is composed of four quadrants, with the top-right (Q1) marked by both high centrality and high density; the bottom-right (Q2) by low density and high centrality, while the top-left (Q3), vice versa, by high density and low centrality; and, finally, the bottom-left (Q4) by both low centrality and low density (Bretas & Alon, 2021).
The clusters in the top-right quadrant (Q1) indicate motor themes, characterized by high centrality and density, well connected to each other but also central in the literature, and represent articles conceiving reshoring as one of the alternatives available to improve global supply chains.In particular, the development of this perspective has been nurtured by the idea of reshoring as an option to cope with geopolitical tensions and de-globalization trends (Charpin, 2022;Pegoraro et al., 2020), but also to exploit the opportunities offered by digitalization and automation (Ancarani et al., 2019;Butollo, 2021).
The relevance of such perspective to reshoring research is further Themes in this quadrant represent basic and transversal topics in the literature analyzed that are discussed in several articles, as the supply chain disruptions brought by the pandemic and the strive for greater global value chain resilience (Panwar et al., 2022;Strange, 2020;van Hoek & Dobrzykowski, 2021).While the presence of manufacturing reshoring as the most transversal theme in the literature is not surprising, considering the main focus of reshoring research on manufacturing activities, two other themes are here noteworthy.One concerns the theme of nearshoring as a form of manufacturing relocation, with the use of this concept to capture relocations of previously offshored activities back to the home region (Fratocchi et al., 2014), rather than a form of proximity offshoring (Roza et al., 2011).The other involves the relationship between prior offshoring and reshoring, essential to fully understand the latter.The link between the two is in fact very tight, not only due to the core discussion of the role of offshoring performance as a potential driver for reshoring (Kinkel, 2012), but also in relation to other aspects such as to the suitability of frameworks initially developed to explain offshoring in accounting for reshoring (e.g., Albertoni et al., 2017;Kedia & Mukherjee, 2009).
In contrast, moving to the opposite side of the map, there is a quadrant (Q3) characterized by low centrality and high density, capturing cohesive and specialized themes that have developed in specific niches of the literature analyzed.Here we find a cluster understanding reshoring as a form of de-internationalization, where foreign activities are reduced rather than increased (Kafouros et al., 2022), and which can be conceived as part of the internationalization process (Ciabuschi et al., 2019).The other two clusters in this quadrant focus on different but complementary aspects of the reshoring decision (McIvor & Bals, 2021), namely the location and sourcing strategy, or governance mode, adopted for the relocated activities (Ellram et al., 2013;Gray et al., 2017) and the organization of global operations and value chains (Butollo, 2021;Pegoraro et al., 2020).In particular, one theme deals with nearshoring as a specific relocation alternative (Piatanesi and Arauzo-Carod, 2019); another with global operations strategies and the importance of right-shoring (Joubioux & Vanpoucke, 2016;Tate & Bals, 2017); and finally, but most importantly, one cluster represents the fast-growing body of research about reshoring in global value chains and sustainability (Ashby, 2016;Fratocchi & Di Stefano, 2019b;Gupta et al., 2021).
The remaining quadrant (Q4) illustrates themes that are neither central nor dense, which can be considered underdeveloped and thus emerging or declining.Partly in this quadrant and partly in the one of transversal themes, it is possible to find the topic of sustainability and global value chain, which can be interpreted as emerging, considering the recency of the references it represents.Research underlying this theme addresses the possible impact of consumer-and policy-level

Table 3
Most productive sources and information on their impact.demands driving reshoring for sustainability (Fratocchi & Di Stefano, 2019b;Gupta et al., 2021), and the potential of reshoring in creating more sustainable production systems (Sirilertsuwan et al., 2019).Further, this part of the map includes a more niche research stream, focused on reshoring as part of a wider manufacturing and location strategy aimed at improving the production footprint of firms (Srai & Ané, 2016), and which can be interpreted as emerging, if related to the previous theme of reshoring as an option to strengthen the global value chain.

Bibliographic coupling
Bibliographic coupling is employed to disclose the different subfields of reshoring research, grouping articles by similarity, in terms of references shared, regardless of the number of citations received.For visualization concerns, and due to the lack of methodological standards for choosing a threshold (Pandey et al., 2022), the network includes the 80 most frequent references.
Fig. 4 highlights the emergence of three main research streams, with two large clusters and a smaller one, whose articles have been analyzed to understand the key themes leading to such structure.The first cluster (Number 1), capturing factors inducing or hindering reshoring initiatives, was labelled reshoring antecedents.These papers address mainly the question of why firms engage in reshoring (Cohen et al., 2018;Gray et al., 2017), trying to identify the major reasons for these initiatives (Zhai et al., 2016).In particular, they find that similar initiatives may be induced by a wide array of motivations, often related to the performance of the offshore activities (Wiesmann et al., 2017), such as: efficiency considerations tied to shrinking cost-differentials and technological development (Ancarani et al., 2015;Dachs, Kinkel, & Jäger, 2019); marketing factors, brand reputation and consumer willingness to reward the reshoring company (Grappi et al., 2018;Moretto et al., 2020); and value chain issues related to the need of greater flexibility, quality and supply chain connectedness (Albertoni et al., 2017;Fratocchi et al., 2016).
The second cluster (Number 2) was called reshoring decision, as it incorporates elements leading to relocation initiatives, such as uncertainty and risk (Ciabuschi et al., 2019;Sayem et al., 2019), or firm and industry characteristics (Dachs, Kinkel, Jäger, et al., 2019), but focuses largely on key dimensions of the decision itself.Specifically, articles are here centered on dimensions as the location trajectory, contrasting backshoring and nearshoring (Merino et al., 2021), and governance mode adopted in the host and home country (Di Mauro et al., 2018;McIvor & Bals, 2021).Furthermore, this cluster encompasses a set of recent papers specifically focused on the decision-making process, revealing important behavioral elements and common mistakes occurring at this stage (Boffelli et al., 2021;Boffelli & Johansson, 2020).
The third cluster (Number 3) was labelled reshoring implementation and outcomes and encompasses studies that present on a more dynamic view of reshoring and move beyond the decision to relocate and include discussions even on the outcomes of reshoring.Articles belonging to this last group cover elements that range from prerequisites for successful implementation (Eriksson et al., 2021) to the consideration of factors shaping the implementation of reshoring (Benstead et al., 2017) and its performance outcome (Stentoft et al., 2018).Clearly this cluster is smaller than the previous two per number of papers, but it is broader in terms of topics covered.

Reshoring Conceptual framework
The sample of 135 articles was content analyzed and organized starting from the classification that emerged in section 3.3, from the analysis of the main themes characterizing this body of literature.Here the division between reshoring antecedents and decision was already well delineated in the results of bibliographic coupling, while a further differentiation emerged along the content analysis process, leading us to make a more fine-grained distinction between the key areas of research.Thus, by combining content analysis with the bibliographic analysis, we derive a "Conceptual Framework of Reshoring Research" structured in five central themes: (i) Reshoring antecedents, namely the different reasons that influence these initiatives; (ii) Reshoring contingencies, i.e., the factors outside the firm's control that can influence the decision and implementation; (iii) Reshoring decision, related to the choice of location, scope, and governance mode choice, (iv) Reshoring implementation, related to the specific actions undertaken to prepare and execute the relocation process; (v) and last Reshoring outcome, concerning the performance, benefits and effects produced by reshoring.Each of these themes present sub-sets of variables where specific focal elements are grouped together.Concerning antecedents, we distinguish between those pertaining specifically to the previous offshoring initiative, and those pertaining to changes in the host-country and in the homecountry; as for contingencies, we distinguish between those at firm, industry and global levels.In reshoring decision, we differentiate between key dimensions of the decision as well as central elements of the decision-making process.As for the implementation, we separate phases (i.e., planification of support, disintegration, transfer, and reintegration) and identify the key implementation factors.At last, concerning the reshoring outcome we distinguish between process level outcomes and reshoring effects at the firm level.
Here below, Fig. 5 presents the proposed reshoring framework, which, by organizing its main thematic research areas, lays new ground for further understanding and conceptualizing of reshoring.Particularly, having extracted and linked different phases and key elements of the reshoring decision, implementation and outcome, this framework sheds a new light on the reshoring phenomenon that suggests the value of studying reshoring as a process, as we will discuss in section 5.6.
We classify each paper within these five areas of research in Table 6, where the research design, the theoretical background and, most importantly, the central themes and focal elements of the papers are presented.

Reshoring antecedents
Reshoring antecedents, understood as the bundle of reasons behind reshoring decisions, has been the category receiving most attention in scholarly work (Barbieri et al., 2018).To elucidate the reasons for companies to engage in similar initiatives, three general explanations are provided in existing literature (McIvor & Bals, 2021).First, the link back to offshoring is the natural core aspect to explore for understanding possible reshoring explanations.Thus, the relationship between offshoring and reshoring is explored in terms of weaknesses associated to the previous offshoring decision as trigger to reshoring decisions (Kinkel, 2014; Kinkel & Maloca, 2009).Examples in this sense are hidden costs resulting from estimation errors (Larsen et al., 2013), or quality issues experienced offshore (Ancarani et al., 2015).In particular, when dealing with the relationship between previous offshoring and reshoring, some authors have highlighted how the drivers underlying these initiatives, namely the factors inducing the relocation decision, may correspond or diverge and lead to different post-relocation performance (Barbieri et al., 2019;Johansson et al., 2019).
Second, reshoring has been understood as a possible reaction to host country changing conditions.If offshoring was driven by the opportunities that host countries environments would provide to the foreign firm (Kedia & Mukherjee, 2009), once those environmental conditions change, as for instance the reduction of cost differentials between home and host countries (Martínez-Mora & Merino, 2014), the diminishing local availability of resources (Ellram et al., 2013), and diminishing growth opportunities (Fratocchi et al., 2016;Wiesmann et al., 2017), the firm would re-evaluate the offshored position and eventually decide to reshore.
Lastly, some home-country factors may also contribute to the decision, such as the risk of loss of know-how in the home country, increasing customer dissatisfaction, and even new policies by local authorities.Reshoring initiatives have also been conceived as arising from changes in firms' competitive strategy (Bals et al., 2016), inducing a supply chain strategic shift and resulting in the relocation of specific foreign activities back to the home country or region (Huq et al., 2016).Similar instances are often driven by changes in supply chain strategy requiring higher resilience (Gereffi, 2020), flexibility and quality (Di Mauro et al., 2018;Robinson & Hsieh, 2016), as well as by a greater need to rely on the "made in" effect (Baraldi et al., 2018).

Reshoring contingencies
Various contingencies have been found to impact different aspects of reshoring, mostly in relation to the decision, but some also influencing the implementation itself.First, there are firm level factors: the size of the firm, type of product to be relocated, market segment and industry structure can be important in steering or constraining reshoring (Benstead et al., 2017;Canham & Hamilton, 2013;Moore et al., 2018).In particular, the availability of competencies, which is related to the firm's size, industry structure and historical dynamics, is fundamental for firms' reshoring readiness (Nujen et al., 2019), and can thus affect the reshoring decision and its successful implementation.
However, firm related factors are not the only important ones and, as already mentioned, one of the overarching motivations for reshoring is a change in the external environment (Fratocchi et al., 2016), which clearly impacts the offshoring performance.External contingencies at industry and global levels, as availability of competence, specialized suppliers and skilled labor (Baraldi et al., 2018), financial crises (Delis et al., 2019), supply chain disruptions brought by the recent pandemic (Barbieri et al., 2020;Strange, 2020;van Hoek & Dobrzykowski, 2021), growing concerns related to sustainability issues (Ashby, 2016), and local policies aimed at attracting local investments (Pegoraro et al., 2022), all can have a significant impact on the reshoring decision, but also on other aspects of the implementation.In fact, external contingencies can even lead to the selection of a specific sub-set of activities to move and to which specific country, within or outside the firm boundaries (Bals et al., 2016).

Reshoring decision
The reshoring decision has been discussed mainly according to three key dimensions, namely location, governance mode, and scope.
Reshoring has from the very beginning been described as an essential location decision (Ellram et al., 2013;Gray et al., 2013), very much in line with the offshoring rationale (Kedia & Mukherjee, 2009), with the geographical component playing a fundamental role in shaping the nature of these initiatives.In their seminal work, Fratocchi et al. (2014) clearly demarcated the different trajectories that reshoring can assume according to the final destination of the relocated activities, distinguishing between back-, near-and further off-shoring for relocations of offshored activities respectively to the firm's home country, home region, and to an even farther location.Despite most scholarly work on reshoring has either focused solely on repatriation to the home country (Albertoni et al., 2017;Stentoft, Olhager, et al., 2016) or to both the home country or region (Moretto et al., 2020), a recent study highlights the difference between the two alternatives and the variables that may steer the decision towards a specific solution (Merino et al., 2021).
The second dimension used to define the reshoring decision is the governance mode adopted in the host and in the home country (Bals et al., 2016;Foerstl et al., 2016).This implies a "make or buy" decision producing the four alternatives of in-house reshoring and outsourced reshoring, when there is no change in the governance mode in the two countries, while reshoring for insourcing involves the relocation of outsourced activities in-house, and reshoring for outsourcing a change in the opposite direction (Gray et al., 2013).The different sourcing options entail fundamental organizational differences and, although offshoring has often been investigated together with outsourcing as a key strategy to enhance organizational efficiency (Kedia & Mukherjee, 2009;Lewin & Peeters, 2006;Mudambi & Venzin, 2010), the reshoring governance mode has been found to widely vary and depend on multiple factors (McIvor & Bals, 2021).In particular, the reshoring sourcing strategy has been connected to the previous offshoring experience (Hartman et al., 2017;Jensen & Pedersen, 2011), the availability of internal resources and competencies (Baraldi et al., 2018), or local suppliers (Di Mauro et al., 2018), as well as to the drivers of the decision (Ancarani et al., 2019;Robinson & Hsieh, 2016), thus potentially leading to either relocations back in-house or to a supplier.
After addressing where activities are re-shored and how, clearly in    (Stentoft, Olhager, et al., 2016) or other types of activities (Albertoni et al., 2017;Fuster et al., 2020) and, most notably, its scope can range anywhere from a very limited to a total relocation of offshored activities (Fratocchi et al., 2014).As it has been highlighted with reference to offshoring initiatives, aimed at fine-slicing the firm's global value chain (Contractor et al., 2010), indeed, also reshoring may entail a specific sub-set of activities.Accordingly, these relocations may be not only highly "selective" (Baraldi et al., 2018), but also part of a more complex reconfigurations of the global supply chain, where some activities are repatriated while others are in parallel offshored.
A minor stream of literature has investigated specific dynamics of the reshoring decision-making process (Bals et al., 2016;Joubioux & Vanpoucke, 2016).These have highlighted elements such as the analysis of alternatives that are not only available, but also feasible for the reshoring firm (Bals et al., 2016), and the importance of extensive ex ante risk and cost-benefit analysis (Boffelli & Johansson, 2020).Moreover, Gray et al. (2017) reveal that these decisions may rely on heuristics and over-simplified considerations, induced by personal feelings and emotional attachment (Boffelli et al., 2020;Ciabuschi et al., 2019), such as the attachment to the home country and sense of belonging to an industrial district (Boffelli et al., 2020;Di Mauro et al., 2018).

Reshoring implementation
Following the decision, the implementation of reshoring, similarly to prior offshoring initiatives (Jensen et al., 2013;Kedia & Mukherjee, 2009;Mudambi & Venzin, 2010), can be envisioned as a reconfiguration of the value chain marked by disintegration, transfer, and reintegration of the activities (Bals et al., 2016).These phases, involving actions directly related to the transfer of operations back to the home country or region, are highly dependent on the type of reshoring decision to be deployed.According to the objectives and scope of the relocation and governance mode adopted in the host and home country, indeed, it can entail varying levels of rearrangement of the firm.
In their recent work, Boffelli et al. (2020) indicated the preparation as key initial moment, where firms create the pre-conditions for supporting reshoring.At this stage, firms evaluate their readiness to engage in relocation initiatives through an assessment of the resources and competencies available (Nujen et al., 2018(Nujen et al., , 2019)), and develop training programs aimed at supporting the future integration of the transferred activities in the home country (Gylling et al., 2015).
The disintegration can entail different types of divestment offshore (Arte & Larimo, 2019), actions aimed at freeing manufacturing capacity (Engström et al., 2018), and business network transformations, depending on the scope and sourcing solution adopted in the two locations, but also on the changes occurring in the host and home markets (Benstead et al., 2017).Concerning the implementation phases, few aspects have been highlighted, such as potential barriers (Benstead et al., 2017), the rapid or more incremental transfer and ramp up times (Boffelli et al., 2020), and some business network aspects as prerequisites (or barriers) to implementation (Baraldi et al., 2018).

Reshoring outcome
The outcome of reshoring has been examined by only few papers, dealing with the performance achieved with reshoring as compared to prior offshoring, and to the motivations driving the relocation initiative, as well as the effects of this latter on multiple levels, typically at process and/or firm levels.Interestingly, Johansson et al. (2019) examined the drivers and benefits of offshoring and reshoring initiatives, finding the two can yield different outcomes.Specifically, they highlighted that while offshoring can be often aimed at achieving cost efficiency, reached through lower labor costs, relocations back to the home country can be guided by the need of specific competencies and greater market proximity, which then ensure greater product quality, flexibility and reduced logistics costs (Johansson & Olhager, 2018a).Furthermore, despite the change in firm performance related to reshoring can be difficult to capture, especially in the case of large firms where it entails the relocation of only a minor part of their activities, Brandon-Jones et al. ( 2017) revealed that reshoring announcements can generate positive stock returns.
The effects of reshoring have also been studied in different contexts.For instance, concerning the global value chain, it was shown that reshoring can lead to higher control on supply chain activities (Robinson & Hsieh, 2016), and thereby trigger upgrading opportunities within the firm's global value chain (Pegoraro et al., 2022).At the same time, it was shown that the business relationships in which the firm is embedded not only shape the reshoring decision, but are also affected by the relocation and can change throughout the process (Baraldi et al., 2018).Moreover, analyzing what happens within the firm boundaries, Grappi et al. (2020a) shows that employees react to reshoring decisions with positive behaviors, thus benefitting the organization.Finally, the same authors investigated also the effects that reshoring decisions can exert on consumers (Grappi et al., 2015(Grappi et al., , 2018(Grappi et al., , 2020b)).In particular, they demonstrated that consumers' ethnocentrism level and their perception of the relocation strategy can trigger various affective responses (Grappi et al., 2015), and develop the concept of "consumer reshoring sentiment", to explain the different emotional reactions and behaviors in which consumers engage to reward the reshoring company (Grappi et al., 2018(Grappi et al., , 2020b)).

Theoretical foundations
As shown by Table 6, the majority of reshoring literature displays no or weak theoretical underpinnings, with the majority of papers limiting their theory section to a review of past theoretical approaches (Di Mauro et al., 2018) or of findings of similar pieces of work (Dachs, Kinkel, Jäger, et al., 2019;Stentoft et al., 2018).Nevertheless, content analysis revealed a certain consensus on how the phenomenon has been theoretically framed, relying largely on the eclectic paradigm (Dunning, 1988(Dunning, , 1998)), transaction cost economics (TCE) (Williamson, 1979), and resource-based view (RBV) (Barney, 1991).
The prevalent theoretical approach is Dunning's eclectic paradigm (Dunning, 1988(Dunning, , 1998)), according to which companies engage in reshoring whenever one or more of their ownership, location or internalization (OLI) advantages deteriorate (Barbieri et al., 2019;Ellram et al., 2013).The OLI framework, being a decision-making framework, resulted highly valuable in organizing the antecedents and reasons of relocation decisions as these were already tested and useful for the relation in terms of offshoring.This logically strengthens also the linking of offshoring to reshoring decisions (Fratocchi et al., 2016).
TCE and RBV have been used to explain reshoring from two different perspectives; TCE have pointed to how the decision to relocate may derive from cost considerations, as was the case for offshoring, including elements related to supply chain costs such as negotiation and monitoring costs, or risk of opportunistic behaviors at the offshore production site (Martínez-Mora & Merino, 2014).On the other hand, RBV has been used to frame reshoring as a decision tied to firms' foreign strategic resources and capabilities, with repatriations explained as a consequence of firms' inability to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage in the host market, i.e., underperformance of offshore activities (Canham & Hamilton, 2013).
All in all, it seems that these specific theories have been mostly used to explain the decisional aspects of reshoring, leaving several of other elements of the reshoring processes rather empirical in their essence and not theoretically anchored.More theoretical work is still to be pursued both in covering other aspects of reshoring (e.g., implementation and outcome) and in adopting alternative approaches to uncover other aspects of the reshoring process such as behavioral theories to explore the dynamics of implementation and business network theory to extend the analysis beyond the focal firm.More on future conceptual developments of reshoring will be discusses in section 5.6.

Future research directions
To further the understanding of reshoring, we propose a research agenda for each of the areas emerged from bibliometric and content analyses (i.e., antecedents, contingencies, decision, implementation and outcome), which is summurized in Table 7.At last, we will also discuss the importance of conceptualizing reshoring as a process in a more comprehensive way, which could be of support to future more extensive theoretical work on reshoring.

Research agenda for reshoring antecedents
Although research on reshoring antecedents is the area that has already received most of the research efforts so far, especially in terms of drivers (Wiesmann et al., 2017), some elements framing the decision to re-shore are still overlooked.Specifically, numerous papers have examined reshoring in relation to prior offshoring (Joubioux & Vanpoucke, 2016), but none has distinguished between relocation of previously offshored activities and those developed in loco in the hostcountry, nor discussed the different nature and implications of the two (Barbieri et al., 2018).This poses not only a conceptual challenge, considering the role that prior offshoring plays in current definitions of the phenomenon (Albertoni et al., 2017;Ellram, 2013;Fratocchi et al., 2014), but also empirical questions related to the motivations behind the repatriation of activities developed abroad that need to be addressed.
Furthermore, recent literature has demonstrated the role of technology advancements in enabling the achievement of greater efficiency and flexibility in the home country, and thus fostering reshoring initiatives (Ancarani et al., 2019;Dachs, Kinkel, & Jäger, 2019).However, technological innovations could be implemented in the host country and act as factors preventing reshoring or even fostering further offshoring.Accordingly, future research should consider not only the multifaceted impact that technology can have on reshoring, but also analyze how specific technological solutions (e.g., automation, robotics, Internet of Things, 3D printing) can steer different relocation decisions.

Research agenda for reshoring contingencies
The impact of internal and external contingencies on reshoring has been recognized in research, though a paucity of studies has focused on these factors so far (Benstead et al., 2017;Moore et al., 2018).However, as seen in our conceptual thematic map (quadrant Q2), one of the basic themes is related to the recent pandemic and related supply chain disruptions.Certainly, given the current turbulent times also at a geopolitical level, more research will and should be focusing on specific disruptive events.
Future research should cover the influence of different contingencies on specific phases of the reshoring overall process.For instance, greater attention could be paid to clarifying what internal and external contingencies affect specific drivers and barriers of reshoring (Moore et al., 2018).Regarding the decision, factors such as firm's size, industry, competencies and product type may exert a substantial influence on the type of reshoring pursued, whether selective or partial, and in-house or outsourced.Simultaneously, environmental factors at different levels, such as availability of suppliers, crises and policy support can encourage or constrain not only the reshoring decision, but also its implementation (Benstead et al., 2017).Accordingly, further effort should be dedicated to characterize reshoring decisions and implementation of firms of different size, and with activities more or less globally distributed, while also differentiating between relocations to and from specific countries.
Finally, worth mentioning is also the role of policies and institutional factors.The latter have been one of the most common explanations provided in international business for decisions to divest foreign activities (e.g., Sidki Darendeli & Hill, 2016;Surdu et al., 2018), and reshoring research could explore the role that institutional change and key factors as host and home country institutional quality, or political and social stability, have in shaping relocation decisions.In addition, relevant future areas of investigation are for instance home and host countries incentives (e.g., Pegoraro et al., 2022), as well as the effects that protectionist initiatives or actions undertaken by the unions and other local institutions can have in both countries.

Research agenda for reshoring decision
Most research has conceived reshoring as a decision (Ellram et al., 2013;McIvor & Bals, 2021), but several aspects of the decision itself D. Pedroletti and F. Ciabuschi have been neglected.Although few authors have revealed behavioral dynamics behind the decision to relocate (Boffelli et al., 2020;Gray et al., 2017), the decision-making process is still scarcely documented (Boffelli & Johansson, 2020).In particular, elements such as the influence exerted by prior offshore experiences, e.g., the learning outcomes of offshoring (Mukherjee et al., 2019), the types of ex ante analysis conducted to evaluate alternative locations and sourcing strategies, the actors involved, as well as their position and location within the company, need to be studied for a deeper understanding of the dynamics culminating in reshoring decisions.In so doing, not only the relative importance and relations among drivers, but also the modes and role played by different actors within and outside the firm can be elucidated.
Regarding what is relocated, future research should pay greater attention to the scope of the relocation, full or partial, and the degree of Contingencies studied mainly as part of the antecedents, and not as interacting elements or in relation to specific phases of the reshoring process -How do contingencies shape the importance of typical drivers and barriers behind reshoring decisions?-Which contingencies could be moderating the reshoring process performance?-How do various contingencies, impact specific reshoring implementation elements?Limited research on firm and industry level contingencies influencing the reshoring decision How do firm's size, competencies, product type, and industry affect the reshoring decision (e.g., selective or full reshoring; backshoring or nearshoring; governance mode)?

Reshoring Decision
Despite the substantial attention dedicated to the antecedents of the decision to relocate, little is known about how these decisions are made -How is the reshoring decision-making process performed?-What elements are pushed by each actor involved, and who contributes to the final decision?Neglect of the importance of what is relocated, in terms of scope of the decision (i.e., full or partial) and nature of the activities.
-What leads to the decision of engaging in full or partial reshoring?-What are common characteristics of full and partial reshoring decisions?In what do they generally contrast?Very limited research on reshoring decisions that involve insourcing as opposed to outsourcing, in the home country -What differences occur in the decision-making process when reshoring inhouse or to local suppliers?-What considerations steer the decision towards insourcing or outsourcing?

Reshoring Implementation
Scant knowledge of the actions enacted to deploy relocation initiatives, simply rolling out what previously decided -How is the implementation process conducted?What are its essential steps, and who performs them?-How does the implementation of reshoring differ for the various decision alternatives?-What elements characterize the deployment of each alternative, and what are instead common?Reshoring so far understood as an instantaneous process, where activities are instantly relocated and not impacting the outcome of the process -What are the crucial elements supporting or hindering foreign disintegration, transfer, and domestic reintegration of activities?-What types of implementation can be pursued (i.e.instantaneous, incremental, or multiple) , and what circumstances do they suit?

Reshoring Outcome
Outcome only assumed to match the initial objectives of reshoring, with scant attention dedicated to how it may diverge from initial plans and over time -How does the outcome of reshoring differ from the initial plan?What unforeseen consequences has it led to? -How does the outcome change over time?how do the short-term effects differ from long-term ones?Lack of studies investigating the impact of reshoring on the firm -What is the impact of reshoring on the firm's capabilities?-How does reshoring affect the firm's innovation process?And how does its innovation capability change?-What does the firm learn when undertaking reshoring?How does reshoring affect future relocations, abroad or back home?Insufficient research about the effects of reshoring on multiple levels -What are the effects of reshoring on the HQ and subsidiary(ies) involved?How does reshoring affect the relationship between them?-What are the effects of reshoring on the business network affected by the relocation?What actors gain and lose value?-What are the effects of reshoring on the region and country involved?What responses does it trigger?

Reshoring Process
Lack of studies concerning the key variables driving the whole reshoring process -Which are the relevant interdependencies between the reshoring process phases?-How is the reshoring process evaluated?Are there feedback loops between reshoring phases leading to changes in the ongoing process?Lack of theoretical development of the reshoring process.
-What type of process is the reshoring process?-What learning and competencies are critical from a reshoring process to the next?-How is reshoring interrelated with other key organizational processes?
D. Pedroletti and F. Ciabuschi specialization of the repatriated activities (Baraldi et al., 2018).Moreover, reshoring research has focused mostly on manufacturing (Barbieri et al., 2018), neglecting reshoring of business services and that of other firm functions besides production (Albertoni et al., 2017).Therefore, considering the peculiarities emerged in offshoring of services (Bunyaratavej et al., 2007;Pisani & Ricart, 2016) and R&D activities (Nieto & Rodríguez, 2011;Steinberg et al., 2017), upcoming studies should indicate and explain the various implications of repatriating activities of different nature.
Finally, the majority of analyzed papers investigated reshoring insourcing decisions (Bals et al., 2016;Foerstl et al., 2016), while barely no consideration has been given to outsourcing reshoring.Nevertheless, the two governance modes may lead to different reshoring processes, thus, the importance for future research to examine more in-depth initiatives where the repatriated activities are outsourced to local suppliers, and even contrast them to reshoring insourcing situations and linked back to the mix situations of governance modes that may emerge between offshoring and reshoring.

Research agenda for reshoring implementation
The implementation of reshoring may entail a substantial level of complexity and prove fundamental for successful initiatives, but it is also the phase that thus far has received the least attention (see Table 6).An essential area to address concerns the duration and extensiveness of reshoring implementation (Boffelli & Johansson, 2020).In this way we could discern peculiar forms of reshoring, such as instantaneous, incremental or multiple, and identify the factors characterizing but also facilitating or hindering these different implementation processes.Next, although few papers started delving into the preparation of reshoring (Nujen et al., 2019), several aspects of this remain unexplored.Specifically, what structure and measures can be adopted to ensure smooth implementation, in terms of development or acquisition of internal resources, and access to external ones, would benefit reshoring research.
Scholarly work should also engage in questions that reveal the complexity and importance of the implementation, and of its different stages (Bals et al., 2016).In particular, supply chain disintegration (Mudambi & Venzin, 2010), namely how activities are broken down within the firm and those in the host country demised, can have important consequences on the post-relocation outcome.At the same time, current research seems often conceiving reshoring as an instantaneous process, where the transfer of resources as machineries, employees, and competencies is immediate and straightforward.However, the transfer of organizational or outsourced activities back to the home country can turn out more complicated and much slower than expected, due to interdependencies between activities, challenges related to lack of knowledge, or different forms of distance (Jensen et al., 2013).Moreover, the reintegration of foreign activities in the home country can result more difficult than expected, due to a new structure of the supply chain and potential problems tied to availability of competencies, coordination and control of the new organization.Therefore, future research should address these areas to enhance knowledge on how activities are effectively relocated, indicating essential factors hampering or facilitating the implementation process.

Research agenda for reshoring outcome
Research on the outcome of reshoring has highlighted the common benefits pursued with offshoring and reshoring (Johansson & Olhager, 2018a), but to date there is scarce understanding of the actual benefits or problems derived from reshoring.Future research should work in this direction, and could focus, besides traditional performance indicators such as efficiency, profit and sales, quality, risk exposure, and control of the supply chain, also onto their inner constituents (e.g., for efficiency, not only labor costs, but also costs of logistics, sourcing, coordination and control, required investments).Furthermore, similarly to past offshoring research (e.g., Larsen et al., 2013), also reshoring scholars should research unforeseen consequences and shortcomings of reshoring, as well as to how the outcome of reshoring may change from a shortor long-term perspective (Boffelli & Johansson, 2020).
Moreover, it can be valuable also to look at the impact (positive or negative) on the innovation capability of the reshoring firm, in a similar fashion to what has been done before when studying relocations to foreign countries (Fuchs & Kirchain, 2010).Also, new research efforts should be devoted to the investigation of how reshoring processes trigger organizational learning and if firms develop specific relocation/reshoring capabilities.This could be a promising venue as much of the internationalization literature underlines the value of organizational learning and particularly of experience (Jensen, 2009;Johanson & Vahlne, 1977), while nothing similar has been done so far concerning reshoring.
Finally, we also recommend more research on the effects beyond the firm boundaries.Specifically, reshoring can involve multiple actors outside the firm, and understanding the change triggered at the level of suppliers, customers, cluster or industry can be fundamental to understand where and for whom value is created or lost.

Conceptualization of reshoring as a process
Our analysis reveals how research on reshoring has been mostly focused on single elements or phases of the phenomenon, but at the same time our conceptual framework shows that the different elements are interconnected in what one could label the overarching "reshoring process", spanning from antecedents to outcomes.Envisioning reshoring as a process, and departing from the single phases or elements focused research, would pave the way to foster more theorizing and understating of the process itself, which is something totally missing so far in the literature and here warranted.
In these respects, we want to highlight two specific areas of research worth pursuing.The first one is related to the internal process dynamics.Conceptualizing reshoring as a process would pave the way to study the interdependences between the phases (e.g., to understand how elements influencing one stage are framing the dynamics of the followings) and how the whole chain of linkages and phases will impact the final outcome.For instance, different antecedents, and particularly the nature of the initial offshoring, can condition the decision process as well as the planning of the reshoring in terms of what is re-shored and how, in addition to determine the barriers and enabling factors for the implementation process.Also, with a less linear view of the process, one might include the fact that variations in effects may trigger changes backwards, concerning what is re-shored and how it is implemented, i.e. learning loops.The latter aspect touches also upon a rather neglected aspect, which is the final evaluation of the reshoring decision and overall process.Understanding how reshoring is evaluated ex-post in time is important not only for possible adjustments in the final re-configuration, but also potentially as learning input for new reshoring decisions.
Related to the latter, a second specific area for future research is "how" we conceptualize reshoring as a process.This requires new ad-hoc theoretical developments for the phenomenon, which so far has been only partially theoretically framed (only for what concerns antecedents and decision) and mostly within the economic tradition.Moreover, conceptualizing reshoring as a process may help shift the focus from its triggers to how the relocation is performed, highlighting what happens from the moment the decision-making occurs to the establishment of the new arrangement.Qualitative longitudinal studies of reshoring initiatives may lead to the development of an evolutionary view of the phenomenon.This approach may provide a more complete picture of reshoring in its complexity, capturing key process-specific factors and the potential discrepancies between planned and actual outcomes.Such efforts would also be important to better relate reshoring to other key broader organizational questions such as organizational change, international strategy and global value chain activities configuration.

Conclusions
The findings of the study have several implications for both practitioners and researchers.Building on a sample of 135 publications on reshoring, we identified the most influential contributions to the field, its development and intellectual structure, to propose thereafter a reshoring conceptual framework contributing to the scientific community with a new framing of existing literature encompassing all reshoring articles up till now.Specifically, the combination of bibliometric and content analyses displayed a progressive shift in focus, from solely on the drivers and barriers leading to the decision, to aspects such as how it is deployed and with what effects.Therefore, reshoring research has been presented in five thematic areas, each composed by a sub-set of focal elements: (i) antecedents, (ii) contingencies, (iii) decision, (iv) implementation, and (v) outcome.Despite the body of literature on reshoring has rapidly grown, this paper is the first attempt to comprehensively review the evolution of the whole field, thus also contributing on a methodological level and complementing previous reviews.
The conceptual framework and the guidance for future research offered by this study will serve as roadmap for scholars in this field.There is considerable scope for new contributions to single areas of research, to methodologies and most important to theoretical development.In relation to the latter, this study contributes also conceptually by showing the value to consider reshoring as process, with interrelated phases and elements.Such a process view can be fundamental in advancing knowledge of the topic and most important in theorizing.For this purpose, we propose an articulated research agenda not only at the single reshoring elements and phases, but also at process level.
The findings are also valuable for policymakers and practitioners as it expands the understanding of the complexity and multi-faced nature of reshoring, which should not be viewed in isolation nor as a short terms occurrence, but contextualized in wider firm processes, and at industry and country levels, and with potentially long-terms effects.These aspects also relate specifically to the necessity of policymakers to target reshoring firms with new policies, as evidence shows mixed results on the effects of current initiatives.
This study is not immune to limitations.First, bibliometric reviews are macro in nature and, although this paper has fulfilled its intended objectives and methodological purpose (Donthu et al., 2021;Mukherjee et al., 2022), we recommend future research to consider methodologies facilitating also in-depth explorations.Critical and domain-specific literature reviews can be employed to further unpack the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings of reshoring research, as well as to understand related phenomena, such as offshoring and other forms of global value chain reconfiguration.Second, the decision to rely on a merged dataset to ensure wider coverage carries two limitations.One concerns the software selection, bound to the use of the Bibliometrix package in R and Biblioshiny interface, enabling the widest array of analysis and visualization options but precluding the employment of other software, such as VOSviewer or Bibexcel (Moral-Muñoz et al., 2020).The other relates to the limited control on the merging procedure of Bibliometrix package in R that automatically removes duplicates of the Scopus and WoS datasets.
Concluding, we anticipate a growth of the reshoring practice for the years to come, and its trajectory will be certainly shaped by the higher uncertainty and rapid changes in the global economic and political scenario.This will require an increasingly strategic approach to international relocations.Firms are learning from reshoring more activities and by its long-term effects.This means that firms not only will become better at reshoring, but also improve their overall capabilities to optimally configure global value chains (Ryan et al., 2022) by for instance simultaneously engaging in different offshoring and reshoring processes to achieve the desired balance between resilience and efficiency.Moreover, policymakers are expected to play an increasing relevant role to implement incentives schemes targeting reshoring companies, not merely for local employment generation but also to become less dependent from other countries in sectors that have high social impact by for instance avoiding shortages of essential supplies, such as drugs or high-tech components.Accordingly, reshoring research will, on one side, give greater attention to the relocation of different activities besides manufacturing, such as services and innovation related ones, and to the role of single national states and their regional policies.On the other, we expect research to develop further at theoretical level and provide new models encompassing a boarder range of theoretical perspectives as well as specific contextualized models of reshoring, for instance at regional vs. country levels or within specific industries.

Fig. 2 .
Fig. 2. Research methodology and key techniques employed to address research questions.

Table 3
Table 4 displays the 20 most productive authors, ranked by number of publications.If on one side Fratocchi, Di Mauro, Barbieri, Hilletofth, and Orzes have published the greatest number of articles, on the other Kinkel, Tate, and Ancarani have also significantly contributed to the field, considering the large number of citations received.

Table 1
Description of the sample.

Table 2
Ranking of top 20 articles (sorted by LC/t).
LC/t = Average local citations per year; LC = Local citations; TC/t = Average total citations per year; TC = Total citations.D. Pedroletti and F. Ciabuschi attested by the cluster of global value chains and covid, appearing in the bottom-right quadrant (Q2), marked by low density and high centrality.

Table 4
Most productive authors (ranked by number of publications).

Table 5
Most prolific institutions (ranked by number of publications).

Table 6
Content analysis of 135 articles.

Table 6
(continued ) (continued on next page) D. Pedroletti and F. Ciabuschi line with offshoring literature, an additional key element relates to what is relocated.The reshoring decision can indeed imply the movement of manufacturing

Table 7
Summary of proposed research agenda.