Human capital, fourth-party logistics, and boundaries of the firm.

Summary The aim of this paper is to analyze the changing boundaries of human-capital-intensive firms resulting from the increasingly important role played by Fourth Party Logistics in their productive activity. The specific relationships between these partners are at the origin of a real evolution in ways of studying interfirm coordination and observing the resulting extension of the boundaries of the firm. We show that traditional approaches to the firm are unsuitable for investigating these strong and complex links. Moreover, we suggest that new theories of the boundaries of firms provide relevant elements for understanding these modern forms of collaboration.