Existent approaches at examining the accelerated offshoring of global firms activities, services and tasks is incomplete, as they do not capture the influence of distance on the stages of offshoring design and the resulting complexity of globally dispersed unit and task interdependencies. Building on the extant offshoring literature and drawing on institutional and geographical views of distance this paper presents propositions on the influence of distance on the configuration of offshoring activities. I posit that present research on offshoring has been mainly goal and outcome orientated and that there is an emerging theme that is starting to consider the design and configuration of offshoring knowledge intensive activities and hidden costs. In this paper I develop a conceptual model of the design of the offshoring stages and the influence of distance on the configuration.