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Customers are important stakeholders for any company; yet, they seem not to be widely discussed in merger and acquisition research. This chapter synthesizes the current body of research on customers in mergers and acquisitions through presenting a systematic literature review. The chapter is based on a systematic literature review resulting from a search in EBSCO Host for any research item that refers to “customer” and “consolidation or merger of corporation.” All articles were coded to specify how customers are described, with a focus on whether customers are expected to affect and/or be affected by the merger or acquisition. Articles were compared with regard to their year of issue and research disciplines of publishing journals. The review indicates how customers continue to be discussed only to limited extent. The customer roles array from them as an acquirable customer base to customers as actors, whose activities become the very reason to merge or acquire. Literature also refers to them as victims and affected by the merger or acquisition, and reacting parties. In addition to the description of welfare transfer from consumers to acquirers in law and economics studies, the different ways of referring to customers extend beyond specific research disciplines. The literature review indicates more multifaceted ways of describing customers in recent research. No systematic literature review on customers in merger and acquisition literature has previously been conducted. The comparison of research disciplines, years of issue, and customer roles provides new insights into developments in the merger and acquisition field of research.

This study aims to explore the intellectual connections of mission statement research to identify the influential domains of source knowledge and emergent areas of research for future studies.

The authors deployed bibliometric methods, namely, citation, co-citation and network analysis. The authors collected data from the Scopus and Web of Science databases and analyzed the connections of the most influential articles.

The authors identified four knowledge domains that informed the mission statements literature: guidance on mission statement development, the value of mission statements, mission statements and organizational issues, mission statement content and communication. And the authors spotted four opportunities for knowledge advancement based on theoretical frameworks, performance measures, content and context.

Practitioners should think beyond the immediate benefits of mission statements, such as performance and legitimacy improvement. Instead, they should focus on long-term benefits, information advantages and democratizing the development phase of mission statements.

Mission statements have attracted scholarly attention over the past 40 years. Despite the formation of a considerable body of knowledge, intellectual connections of mission statement research have been largely neglected. Previous studies had a narrow focus or insufficient coverage of the literature. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first full-scale bibliometric study on the intellectual connections of the mission statements literature.

The purpose of this paper is to systematically review and critically examine marketing research on mergers and acquisitions (M&As), and articulates its importance and relevance in consideration of the growing influence of the M&A phenomenon in the global economy.

A two-stage systematic review of the extant literature was conducted focusing on peer-reviewed journal articles published during a 28 year period – from 1987 to 2014.

A systematic analysis of 32 journal articles reveals that M&A research is a vibrant and rapidly growing stream of the broader marketing domain, and that it is contextually, methodologically and thematically diverse. The findings also highlight several literature trends and shortcomings, as well as the complex nature of the relationship between marketing and M&As.

On the basis of the critique, we develop an ambitious research agenda that raises exciting new research questions for the scholar community and helps promote future theory development in marketing, strategy, and other related disciplines.

This chapter focuses on the Chinese cross-border merger and acquisition (M&A) amid the rising trend of multinational companies from emerging economies. Based on a systematic review of published papers in top international business/strategy/organization journals on Chinese overseas M&A, we offer a tentative multilevel framework to consolidate the past achievement, consider contemporary debates, so as to direct future research efforts. We suggest that Chinese overseas M&A research should emphasize on a process perspective ranging from pre-acquisition to post-acquisition. In addition, qualitative research and methodological pluralism should be embraced to achieve this goal due to the nature of this emerging field of Chinese cross-border M&A. By allocating the extant literature into the multilevel framework, we articulate the demand and identify several potential topics for scholarly inquiry in the future in order to gain a nuanced understanding of this important phenomenon of Chinese cross-border M&A for both China and the rest of the world.

In this paper, we responded to recent calls for the use of a greater variety of qualitative methods in the study of inter-organizational encounters, including mergers and acquisitions (M&As). The paper provided a reflection on the authors’ experiences in carrying out two studies of merger processes in the UK and Finland, one ethnographic and one combing also auto-­ethnographic methods. Contrasts between the former case of an “outsider” entering into an ethnographic study and the latter case of an auto-ethnographer with a dual role as a researcher and integration team member were highlighted. The paper offered three contributions to extant research. First, the paper extended the methodological debate in the study of M&As to the level of individual methods. Second, the paper identified the finding types that emerge when using ethnographic methods in the study of mergers. Third, the paper discussed the unique challenges posed when conducting ethnographic work investigating organizational combinations in times of mergers as opposed to ethnography in traditional, single organizational settings.

Advisors play a key role in the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) process, but research to date has rarely focused on how their influence impacts these transactions. The present chapter takes stock of the present literature on M&A advisors from finance, economics, and management in order to integrate the currently diverging research traditions into a coherent framework. The current research has focused on proximal acquisition outcomes, like acquisition premiums or expected performance in the form of cumulative abnormal returns, but there is limited theoretical understanding of the advisors impact on the post-acquisition period. Moreover, while the role of advisor reputation has been highlighted on both the management and finance literatures as an important aspect of the role advisors play in the M&A process, there seems to be much to be addressed. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, the nature of the relationship between the advisor and the acquirer or target presents challenges to researchers where the advisor acts both as a provider of expertise in the M&A process, but may be simply acting on their own best interest. The new framework that the authors present here provides management scholars with a roadmap into a cohesive research agenda that can inform our theoretical understanding of the role of M&A advisors.

Empirical evidence for the positive correlation between company size and competitiveness is widely supported in the literature and research. Of the many ways in which companies can increase in size, mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are the most common. M&As are now a strategic option for corporations to exploit emerging opportunities in order to expand. This paper reviewed the literature on how M&As impact company’s performance, comparing pre-merger and post-merger situations. We found that while scholars have explored this topic extensively, no minimum level of consensus has been reached, not only in conclusions but neither in methodologies nor in identifying independent and dependent variables. The evidence from the M&A literature is extremely inconsistent. Based on these mixed findings, we identified directions for future research, and suggested how to develop the scholarship to reach a consensus on the answer to the research question: does company performance improve after M&As?

For several years, scholars studying mergers and acquisitions (M&A) regret their incapacity to fully capture and understand this complex phenomenon. Several authors have called for multidisciplinary approaches to improve our research. We believe that, instead of focusing on theories and multidisciplinarity, a complementary line of attack could be to put into question the methods used to study M&As. The purpose of this chapter is to show how mixed methods research can be a relevant design to open the black box of M&A and improve our understanding of M&A integration processes. Indeed, a key feature of mixed methods research is its methodological pluralism or eclecticism, which frequently results in superior research compared to mono-method research. In this chapter, we first define mixed methods research; we then review the literature on M&A using mixed methods and finally show the pros and cons of this research design to advance our understanding of M&A.

The authors examine how performance measurement systems (PMSs) and academic agency influence the meaning of research quality in practice. The worries are that the notion of research quality is becoming too simplistically and narrowly determined by research quality's measurable proxies and that academics, especially manager-academics, do not sufficiently realise this risk. Whilst prior literature has covered the effects of performance measurement in the university sector broadly and how PMSs are mobilised locally, there is only little understanding of whether and how PMSs affect the meaning of research quality in practice.

The study is designed as a comparative case study of two university faculties in Finland. The role of conceptual analysis plays a notable role in the study, too.

The authors find that manager-academics of the two examined faculties have rather similar conceptual understandings of research quality. However, there were differences in the degree of slippage between the “espoused-meaning” of research quality and “meaning-in-practice” of research quality. The authors traced these differences to how the local PMS and manager-academics’ agency relate to one another within the context of increasing global and national performance pressures. The authors developed a tentative framework for the various “styles of agency”. This suggests how the relationship between the local PMS and manager-academics’ exerted agency shapes the “degrees of freedom” of the meaning of research quality in practice.

Given that research quality lies at the heart of academic work, the authors' paper indicates that exploring the three matters – performance measurement, the agency of manager-academics and the meaning of research quality in practice – in combination is crucial for the sustainability of the academe. The authors contribute to the literature by detailing the way in which local PMS and manager-academics' agency have material impacts on what research quality means in practice. The authors conclude by highlighting the pressing need for manager-academics to exercise the agency in efforts to safeguard a broad and pluralistic understanding of research quality in practice.

Thus, this study aims to determine the status-quo of research on the role of IT in M&A from 2010 to 2022 by providing a summative meta-analysis of this phenomenon.

This study presents a meta-analysis of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) research in information systems (IS), aimed at accounting for themes in M&A literature over the past 13 years, research methodology, research frameworks, level of analysis and geographical distribution. A total of 47 articles from 24 peer review articles and 23 conference publications were analyzed from 2010 to 2022.

Findings of the study suggest that M&A research in IS emphasizes IS integration at the expense of other under-explored dimensions such as M&A context, stakeholder involvement and within-firm conditions. Although studies on M&A have increased over the past 10 years, a significant number of studies have not been underpinned by models and theories. Also, a large number of studies adopted the qualitative approach as research methodology compared to quantitative, design science and mixed methods.

This study contributes to the literature on M&A in IS by proposing an M&A in IS research framework that bridges the gap between existing and future studies on M&A in IS research by shedding more light into well research areas and opportunities for further studies.