Mergers & Acquisition

Arguably the most significant way in which firms and industries are restructured, M&A represent massive commitments of money and effort. Trillions of dollars have been involved in M&A over the last decade, and the ramifications for businesses, management, employees, industries - and even economies - have been profound.

It is not surprising, then, that M&A have attracted a great deal of academic attention, and that certain aspects of the phenomena have been investigated in great depth. For instance, the large finance literature has intensively examined issues such as whether M&A are successful, and the best ways to finance them. Economists have invested significant amounts of energy into understanding how M&A affect the competitive structure of industry and whether M&A benefit society as a whole. Organisational behaviouralists have focused upon the human costs of M&A at both collective and individual levels manifest in post-acquisition integration. Less well recognised, however, is that M&A are multi-faceted and complex in nature. They cannot be understood satisfactorily from one academic perspective alone. Indeed, to go further, many of the 'problems and paradoxes' identified in M&A literatures are the result of overly myopic approaches to the phenomena.

To understand M&A fully requires a multi-disciplinary approach, which we shall be using in this module.