Software outsourcing partnership process - a life cycle?

Van de Ven and Poole contend that all the specific theories of organizational change and development used in management research come back to four basic theories: life cycle theory, evolution theory, dialectic theory, and teleology, and that most of the organizational theories are some kind of combination of these four. In outsourcing research most of the researchers implicitly assume that an outsourcing process follows the life cycle theory. In this study we analysed a software outsourcing partnership model and found out that the model indeed followed life cycle theory.