This dissertation is dedicated to the transition period related to the outsourcing of an activity from an organization to another one. Its objective is to describe the emergence of a hybrid control device between market and hierarchy. We studied during 15 months a global IT outsourcing project from a client to three customers’ shared service centers. The field analysis is based on two “conceptual ways” grounded in Actor Network Theory. The first moves from Transaction Cost Economics to “Translation Cost Economy”. The second one puts forward the concept of small points of control accumulation responding to Vosselman & Van der Meer-Kooistra’s call to investigate “control in the making” (2006). The transition phase shed light on the proposition that costs of translation and small points of control accumulation created a “double register” tracing the movement of services co-construction and the related control device emergence. The local facts were framed by the project team and brought into one of the shared IT service center. An accumulation cycle of knowledge was running. This movement made both the project and the service actual but at the cost of translating the initial service defined by the contract. The price to act at distance was reduced and the shared IT service center could be considered as “economic”. However, the outsourcing process led to a transformation of the IT activity and modified the identity of the groups of actors. The comparison between the two situations, before and after outsourcing, was made difficult because of translation costs inherent to the transformation of the contract into a socio-technical device implemented to deliver the service.
