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Merger and acquisition (M&A) is a way to survive and succeed in a competitive global environment as a consequence of new political, monetary and regulatory issues. The complex phenomenon that M&As represent has received consistent attention from the research community over the last 30 years.

M&As are a strategic choice to grow quicker, enter new markets and maximize companies' capabilities, which otherwise would not have been possible. Within the automotive industry, this phenomenon has been seen repeatedly with examples like Mitsubishi-Daimler, Jaguar-Ford, Daimler-Chrysler, Seat-Volkswagen, Daewoo-General Motors and Land Rover-Ford. Although M&A activity has trended directionally consistent with automotive assembly volume, there are some failure cases within automotive industry M&As (e.g., Rover-BMW). In this chapter, the focus is on the intercultural issues of the M&A phenomenon. The underestimation of the cultural factors has significant impact on why M&A operations sometimes fail to achieve the predefined goals.

It is of vital importance for the automotive companies to understand and be aware of these intercultural issues in order to be successful in their merger or acquisition.

The phenomenon of M&A within the automotive industry needs further research and discussions due to the fact that some strategic alliances and M&A proved to be successful (e.g., Škoda-Volkswagen) and others not (e.g., Rover-BMW).

Governments throughout the world have sought, and are seeking, to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) and, for that purposed, have liberalized their national regulatory frameworks for FDI and established a strong international investment law regime. However, there are signs that, as a result of a number of important developments (which are being discussed in some detail in this chapter), governments are re-evaluating their stance toward FDI, or at least certain types of it. This re-evaluation has found its expression in a number of regulatory changes that may eventually lead to a regime that balances the rights of investors and host countries in a manner that places more emphasis on maintaining policy space for host-country governments while still protecting foreign investors.

Cultures don’t clash … people do. Hidden below the veil of “incompatible cultures” is a complex network of human-to-human interaction involving information-exchange transactions that have gone awry. The multitude of these troubled exchanges results in what is often branded as “M&A failure, due to culture conflict.”

This chapter presents a theoretical discussion that features practical dynamics of the post-merger integration (PMI) process. The aim is to cultivate a deeper understanding of critical, less-acknowledged micro-level aspects of the post-merger integration stage, specifically, those which underlie the development and maintenance of an organization’s culture and lead to organization performance. It is the unseen information exchange among human actors that leads to the perceptible post-merger outcomes, such as cultural unity and task performance. The quality of these micro-exchanges leads to the value capture from the M&A transaction, thus determining the success – or not – of the combination.

Presented is a synthesis of numerous existing theories, perspectives, and ideas from various scholarly communities, combined with a drill-down to the basic human interactions that define a culture and lead to positive performance. Information flow is the sustenance of an organization, so when merging organizations restructure the information flow is abruptly disrupted, often at pronounced near-term cost. The information-flow channels must be mended for social unification and performance value goals of the combined organization to be realized. The information-transporting social networks of the organizational actors must therefore adapt and intermingle across the old-organizational faultlines. This is accomplished when individual actors alter their personal social networks and retool themselves for a new set of information-exchange interactions.

In closing, the author counsels managers to focus on the dyadic information exchange of their direct-reports as an actionable approach to PMI management. The chapter concludes by pointing researchers toward studying the micro-level aspects of PMI and offers computer modeling and simulation, and laboratory experiments as effective ways to study PMI dynamics at the micro-level of organization behavior. Such methods may also lead to an ability to forecast outcomes of specific post-merger integration scenarios.

This work examines the interplay between power, status and style. Building on the dual role of power and status as two primary sources of social influence in contemporary consumer society, we propose that stylistic choices associated with greater status can imbue the wearer with greater feelings of power. We focus on a pervasive stylistic choice for women – whether to wear heels – and test two critical relationships regarding consumers' choice of heels that can act as a bridge between status and power. First, we propose that the stylistic choice of wearing heels increases wearers' perceived status (but not perceived power) – the heeled status-enhancement hypothesis, whereby (1) wearing heels increases wearers' perceived status (but not perceived power) among observers and (2) lacking power (vs having power or baseline) yields greater desire for heels over flats. Second, we propose that an increase in status stemming from wearing heels increases consumers' feelings and behaviours of high power – the status–power transfer hypothesis. Three studies confirm the use and perception of heels as status symbols and provide support for both hypotheses. We show that wearing heels (vs flat shoes) makes individuals feel and behave more powerfully by thinking more abstractly and taking more actions, two hallmarks of high power, but only when heels are worn conspicuously (i.e., the wearer knows the observer sees them). In addition, these effects are mediated by wearer's feelings of power and unexplained by perceptions of sexiness. Implications for the literatures on style, status, power and conspicuous consumption are discussed.

Research on student teacher learning has identified development of a professional identity as an inevitable focus in teacher education. Accordingly, many teacher education programs have come to include attention for the development of student teachers’ professional identities, but not much research has been done on the (effects of) pedagogies that have such development as their goal. Pedagogies that aim at developing teacher identity share common elements, such as the view that developing a professional identity is an ongoing process and the view that developing a professional identity as a teacher unmistakably includes a combination of personal and professional (including contextual) aspects. This chapter describes pedagogies that focus particularly on the development of student teachers’ and beginning teachers’ professional identity, from different angles, but sharing the views as described above. First, we describe two pedagogies that have “key incidents” in student teachers’ development as focus point. Second, we report on the “subject-autobiography,” in which student teachers describe and develop how their identity is shaped in relation to the subject they (learn to) teach. Third, we describe the “at-tension” program, which teachers follow during their first year of teaching, and which focuses particularly on the professional tensions that they experience in their first year of teaching, and how they personally and professionally deal with socialization in the school context. Together, these pedagogies reflect our view that professional identity development is underlying the entire teacher education program. This view implies that only a combination of various-focus pedagogies enables student teachers to develop a full-fledged professional identity.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

Research examining the experiences of women in the workplace has, to a large extent, neglected the unique stressors pregnant employees may experience. Stress during pregnancy has been shown consistently to lead to detrimental consequences for the mother and her baby. Using job stress theories, we develop an expanded theoretical model of experienced stress during pregnancy and the potential detrimental health outcomes for the mother and her baby. Our theoretical model includes factors from multiple levels (i.e., individual, interpersonal, sociocultural, and community) and the role they play on the health and well-being of the pregnant employee and her baby. In order to gain a deeper understanding of job stress during pregnancy, we examine three pregnancy-specific organizational stressors (i.e., perceived pregnancy discrimination, pregnancy disclosure, and identity-role conflict) that are unique to pregnant employees. These stressors are argued to be over and above the normal job stressors experienced and they are proposed to result in elevated levels of experienced stress leading to detrimental health outcomes for the mother and baby. The role of resilience resources and learning in reducing some of the negative outcomes from job stressors is also explored.