Information Resource Management Journal, 21(1), 27-43, January-March 2008 27 Copyright © 2008, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. AbstrAct Due to the growing academic and practitioner interest in the ield of outsourcing, there is a need to do a comprehensive assessment and synthesis of research activities to date. This article addresses this need and examines the academic literature on information systems outsourcing and business process outsourcing using a paradigmatic and methodological lens. The objective of this article is fourfold. Firstly, it examines the status of outsourcing research from 1995 to 2005 in eight leading academic journals, to compare the current research trends with past research directions in terms of methodologies applied. Secondly, it ana- lyzes the research paradigms adopted in these research papers using the Operations Research Paradigm framework. Thirdly, it compares and contrasts the outsourcing research work published in three leading European journals with the work published in three leading American journals. Finally, it uncovers the implications of this study and the directions for future research. Keywords: methodology; outsourcing of IS; qualitative research; quantitative research; review; research paradigms A Paradigmatic and Methodological review of research in Outsourcing Vanita Yadav, Management Development Institute, India Rajen K. Gupta, Management Development Institute, India INtrODUctION Eastman Kodak’s decision to outsource its information systems (IS) function in 1989 to IBM, DEC, and Businessland formally launched the phenomenon of outsourcing in the corpo- rate world which aroused interest worldwide. Outsourcing is deined as the procurement of products and services from sources that are external to the organization (Lankford & Parsa, 1999). The e-commerce revolution has forced the transformation of traditional IS outsourcing structures into new outsourcing service conigurations, like Internet service outsourcing, application service outsourcing, and business process (BP) outsourcing (Wat- jatrakul, 2005). Businesses today are growing in complex- ity and the world is moving towards global- ization. As a result the forces of outsourcing have become a present-day reality and are poised for phenomenal growth in the future. The importance of outsourcing in industry has led to extensive research in this area. Most of the research done in outsourcing is in the ield of IS outsourcing. In the last few years, there has been a rise in another more process-centric