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This chapter examines the use of signaling mechanism to identify promising acquisition targets. It draws on the importance of inter-organizational relationships of target firms and their relevance as signals of firm quality. It takes into account two types of inter-organizational relationships, alliances and corporate venture capital (CVC) investments. It further identifies the boundary conditions that are most likely to influence the acquisition decision of the acquirer. These are based on the characteristics of target firms and their partners. By considering the role of CVC investments and alliances as signals of firm quality, the study draws a connection between how the different types of equity and non-equity relationships of firms influence the acquirer’s choice of potential takeover target.

The theoretical frame based on the signaling perspective provides fresh and valuable insights to evaluate the quality of target firms. The research provides directions for future opportunities to examine the value of signals and whether such signals create synergies in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) deals. The author identifies new avenues of research that would help to move forward the signaling perspective in the literature on M&A.

Extant research posits that mergers and acquisition (M&As) do not create value. Still many firms adopt expansion strategies such as alliances, joint ventures (JVs), and M&As to grow and enhance their performance. Through performing a meta-analysis on 204 papers that assess the relationship between the three most prevalent expansion strategies formed by firms, alliances, JVs, and M&As and their different substantive and symbolic performance effects, this study contributes in two ways. First, it becomes clear that alliances and M&As enhance a firm’s substantive performance, while no positive performance effect is observed for JVs. In turn, all three expansion strategies boost a firm’s symbolic performance in terms of its legitimacy and status. Second, a distinction between their effects on a firm’s substantive performance in terms of their market-based and accounting-based performance shows that alliances and M&As both positively contribute to a firm’s accounting-based performance, while only the former spurs a firm’s market-based returns. This indicates that M&As have more long-term accounting-based performance effects compared to alliances and JVs, which suggests that in the long-term firms do best by expanding through M&As.

This paper undertakes an empirical analysis of the impact of absorbed and unabsorbed slack, employing three different measures for each slack type, on firm profitability. We find that unabsorbed slack has a more favorable influence on future firm profitability than absorbed slack. While all the absorbed slack indicators have a significant negative influence on future profitability, the three unabsorbed slack indicators present positive, negative, and non-significant influences, respectively. The fewer constraints of unabsorbed slack on the redeployment to exploit new opportunities point to its comparative advantage over absorbed slack. We find evidence for the differential impact of absorbed versus unabsorbed slack on profitability in firms with lower levels of slack, which suggests firms prefer to withdraw resources from current business and redeploy them to develop new and more favorable business opportunities.

In this study we investigated the effects of news reports on acquirer short-term performance. Our focus was on the extent to which key deal characteristics – the type of deal, during a merger wave or not or the presence of a significant premium – are made explicit. Moreover, we looked for the effect of the assessment of the deal characteristics by different key informants: board members, top management team members, and analysts. Configurations derived using the set-theoretic approach suggest that media-transmitted signals form complex interrelations among content and informant. We found that investors react positively to deals that are surrounded by unequivocal signals of synergy potential: they contain explicitly stated deal characteristics as well as deal endorsements from the boards and/or top management of acquirer and target companies. Analysts’ assessments of the deals seem to bear little influence on investor reaction. Meanwhile, investors react negatively to deals with low or absent media coverage as well as deals surrounded by signals of ambiguous synergy potential.

When I arrived at Stanford in the fall of 1993, the university was a thriving site of organizational research. The department of sociology served as a sort of epicenter, with workshops on organizational ecology (led by Mike Hannan), organizations in the world polity (John Meyer and Francisco “Chiqui” Ramirez), and healthcare organizations (Dick Scott). In the school of education, Jim March was intriguing a new generation of students with his puzzles and wisdom. In addition to Mike Hannan's joint appointment, the Graduate School of Business featured such luminaries as Jeff Pfeffer, Joanne Martin, Jim Baron, Joel Podolny, and Bill Barnett. Slightly further afield, Ray Leavitt and Michael Fehling had begun to train engineers to think about organizational issues, as they developed computer simulations with nuanced attention to cognitive and decision-making processes. Steve Barley would join (what was then) the department of industrial engineering in 1994 and Mark Granovetter would join the department of sociology in 1995, adding fresh insights from the sociology of work and economic sociology, respectively, to what was already a firm foundation for organization studies. The umbrella organization that linked many of these efforts was the Stanford Consortium on Organizational Research (SCOR), which had been guided by Dick Scott's able leadership since 1988 and hosted an annual organizations conference at the beautiful Asilomar retreat in Monterey, California.

This paper examines the growth of private corporate influence in American higher education. A key question is corporate philanthropy and privatization at what cost? The terms often used in these discussions are commodification of the academy, privatization of a public good, or the increasing corporatization of higher education. Today, American universities are responding to the demands of the marketplace, as knowledge is being used as a form of venture capital and where professors have become academic entrepreneurs and students have become consumers. The foregoing is made more complex as an increasingly diverse student pool seeks access to postsecondary education, in the face of federal policies that serve to restrict access and financial support. A discussion of the collateral costs of our corporate culture as we face challenges to access, equity, and opportunity in America in the twenty-first century concludes this paper.

A synthesis of the various strands of macro-sociology that is commensurate with a more robust theory of evolutionary institutionalism.

Drawing from what may be conceived of as classical institutionalism and from neo-evolutionary sociology and other related traditions, this chapter endeavors to provide a general theory of evolutionary institutionalism as an overview of institutions and institutional autonomy (along with the underlying forces driving the process of autonomy), to present a theory of institutional evolution that delineates the relevant units of selection and evolution, the types of mechanisms that facilitate institutional evolution, and a typology of the sources of variation.

The chapter constitutes the attempt to provide a theoretical framework intended to engender an improved historical-comparative institutionalism inspired by the works of Max Weber and Herbert Spencer.

The purpose of the theoretical framework presented should not be misconstrued as a general, “grand” theory for the discipline of the sociology as a whole, but rather understood as the model of a common vocabulary for sociologists interested in macro-sociology, institutions, and socio-cultural evolution designed to complement other available models.

As a synthesis, the originality of the theoretical framework presented lies in (1) elucidation of the idea that institutional autonomy as the “master” process of institutional evolution, (2) more precise delineation of the link between meso-level institutional entrepreneurs and institutional evolution, and (3) combination of a body of complementary – yet often loosely linked – bodies of scholarship.

This paper empirically examines the impact of corporate governance reforms on the financial performance of Indian state-owned enterprises (SOEs) for the period 2003–2011.

The findings indicate that the various corporate governance reforms collectively exhibited a statistically significant positive impact on performance when a difference in difference estimation process is used. However, the performance of SOEs is less than that of publicly listed companies, which is consistent with prior research. When the SOEs are compared with a matched pairing of publicly listed companies of similar size and same industry, their performance was comparable and in many instances superior. This is indicative of the regulatory constraints on competitors and preferential access to resources and markets given to the SOEs. As SOEs move towards a more mixed ownership model with more of them listed on the stock exchange and greater public ownership of shares the corporate governance issues will increase in importance.

The controlled sell down of shares in SOEs presents a need for continuing governance reforms and ongoing research to track progress.

The most striking observation from the study is that changes that were introduced as a corporate governance reform, such greater professionalism in boards, did not gain traction and enhance performance, rather the process of director selection and the concentrated bureaucratic and political interference stymied what was asserted to be conceptually sound reforms.