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The diversification phase observed in the American economy since 1975 (Leontiades, 1980) has led to significant questioning about the dimensions constituting related diversification. During the 1980s, the disappointing performances of businesses that had implemented related diversifications pushed researchers to take a closer look at the challenges involved in integration to discover commonalities in progressing from potential synergy to synergy achieved. As a result, many recent research endeavors have attempted to describe the management and integration process best suited to the context (Haspelagh & Jemison, 1991; Marks & Mirvis, 1998; Pablo, 1994; Shrivastava, 1986). Obviously, their attention focused primarily on initiatives targeting integration on the functional, structural, and operational levels, without really taking into account the historical, cognitive, and cultural baggage that each business carries around with it.

This research is intended to provide a better understanding of the factors that contribute to creating synergies between companies undertaking an integration process involving related diversification. Based on the cognitive approach, it is premised on the notion that creating synergy primarily depends on reconciling the collective representations of the companies involved rather than on simply implementing measures designed to achieve technical and operational integration.

This study places particular emphasis on the concept of collective representations, which recognizes that organizational players come to adopt a relatively homogeneous view of the world. It proposes an analysis framework and research method enabling it to go beyond the limits of attempts that, up until now, have strived to quantify and substantiate the mental schemata of organizations involved in merger acquisition. Moreover, these attempts have been criticized as being too vague (Côté, Langley & Pasquero, 1999; Grant, 1988; Lampel & Shamsie, 2000).

In order to characterize the content of collective representations specific to each of the organizations undergoing integration, we propose applying a new approach in the sociology of organizations called the theory of conventions (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1991, 1994). The convention theory posits that organizational players share representation systems that help forge interaction rules. Collective, concerted action is made possible by mobilizing common frameworks, that is, conventions. These conventions are characterized by higher principles specific to each city. The outcome can be agreement or conflict, depending on whether player justifications are rooted in the same city or not.

Through the longitudinal analysis of the case of related diversification, specifically a Canadian chartered bank’s acquisition of two brokerage subsidiaries (1987, 1994), this study examines the evolution of the integration initiatives and collective representations of the businesses involved. We made two significant observations in examining the various integration initiatives undertaken by the bank during the period under study. First, the integration initiatives could be described as falling into the technical, structural, and operational categories. Second, their outcomes, both qualitatively and quantitatively, were far from conclusive.

Concurrent analysis of justificatory fragments of the three organizations, during the period under studied, revealed divergence between the justification modes that each of the businesses opted for. This divergence of dominant collective representations enabled us to interpret the issues encountered during these initiatives and posit a new explanation for their qualified success.

Purpose – This study examines how managerial ability relates to employee productivity using a broad and generalized sample of US firms.

Methodology – This study employs a generalized sample of firm-years from all industries between 1980 and 2013.

Findings – By contending that managers differ in their ability to synchronize management processes and human capital in ways that enhance employee productivity, the authors provide evidence showing that more-able managers are associated with higher employee productivity. In addition, the authors find that high-ability managers moderate the negative relation between uncertain environments (high-technology firms) and employee productivity. Furthermore, the authors decompose employee productivity into employee efficiency components and employee cost components. The authors find a significant positive association between managerial ability and the employee efficiency component, but do not see a significant association between managerial ability and the employee cost component.

Value – The results contribute to the understanding of employee productivity by showing the relation between managerial ability and employee productivity.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century to the first decade of the twentieth century, the US Federal and Supreme Courts heard several cases on the legal status of ships. During this period, Chief Justice John Marshall and Justice Joseph Story determined that a ship was a legal person that was capable to contract and could be punished for wrongdoing. Over the nineteenth century, Marshall and Story also heard appeals on the illegal slave trade and on the status of fugitive slaves crossing state lines, cases that raised questions as to whether enslaved peoples were persons or property. Although Marshall and Story did not discuss the ship and the slave together, in this chapter, the author asks what might be gained in doing so. Specifically, what might a reading of the ship and the slave as juridical figures reveal about the history of legal personhood? The genealogy of positive and negative legal personhood that the author begins to trace here draws inspiration and guidance from scholars writing critically of slavery. In different ways, this literature emphasises the significance of maritime worlds to conceptions of racial terror, freedom, and fugitivity. Building on these insights, the author reads the ship and the slave as central characters in the history of legal personhood, a reading that highlights the interconnections between maritime law and the laws of slavery and foregrounds the changing intensities of Anglo imperial power and racial and colonial violence in shaping the legal person.

This paper poses the question of whether the mainstream feminist movement in the United States, in concentrating its efforts on achieving gender parity in the existing workplace, is selling women short. In it, I argue that contemporary U.S. feminism has not adequately theorized the problems with the relatively unregulated market system in the United States. That failure has contributed to a situation in which women’s participation in the labor market is mistakenly equated with liberation, and in which other far-ranging effects of the market system on women’s lives inside and outside of work – many of them negative – are overlooked. To theorize the effects of the market system on women’s lives in a more nuanced manner, I borrow from the insights of earlier Marxist and socialist feminists. I then use this more nuanced perspective to outline an agenda for feminism, which I call “market-cautious feminism,” that seeks to regulate the market to serve women’s interests.

This chapter contributes to drawing Melanesian ethnography out of the exoticizing interest for gift exchange and demand-sharing. Furthermore, it provides an analytical perspective from which it is possible to conceptualize the manipulation of gift and commodity logics as mutually compatible frameworks. Rather than seeing them as contradictory, this perspective enables the theorization of shared calculative agencies that are becoming increasingly common in contemporary Melanesia.

The chapter draws on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Gilbert Camp, a peri-urban settlement on the outskirts of Honiara, Solomon Islands with a focus on the domestic moral economy of its inhabitants.

The people of Gilbert Camp are confronting a difficult economic and moral dilemma. On the one hand, they are at constant risk of financial failure because of their general conditions of scarcity. On the other, they face the prospect of disrupting some of their much-valued social relationships because such scarcity prevents them from fulfilling their cultural obligations. In order to avoid both risks, they make use of their financial competence and cultural creativity to set up strategies that save them money and preserve these relationships. Situated at the interface between kinship and market values, these strategies contribute to achieving the kind of ‘good’ life that they see as the correct balance between financial prosperity and morality.

Current negotiations over the meaning of buying, selling and taking are changing the values of contemporary sociality in Honiara, Port Vila, and other Melanesian cities. Tradestores simultaneously supply households with food and money, create a sense of sharing, and limit the demand-sharing and the taking of wantoks. Hence they create the conditions for the resolution of tensions over the incompatibility of values of kinship and market that confront the inhabitants of Melanesian cities. Household tradestores thus constitute a major site of these negotiations, and they provide a unique vantage point from which to look at the moral and economic processes that are leading to the future identity of urban Melanesia.

The political campaigns of Una Clarke and Major Owens show an interesting display of ethnic politics. In this paper, I argue that the presence of a Caribbean population in Brooklyn New York presents itself as a challenge to the already present African-American structure. The Caribbean politicians do not subscribe nor fully ally with the African-American politicians, and instead, seek to carve out a niche for themselves and utilize their ties to home in an effort to cajole the Caribbean populace for support. Through the purview of a political campaign in Brooklyn between an African-American incumbent and a Caribbean insurgent, I attempt to contribute to the transnationalist literature through illustrating the concept of the nation−state, which can be explained as an immigrant’s continual bond to their home country while living abroad.