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Post-acquisition integration matters for overall M&A outcome. However within this phase researchers have struggled to identify clear links between integration activities and post-acquisition outcome. This may be due to using organisational levels of analysis, where sub-organisational issues serve to confound findings. In order to unpack the post-acquisition phase, and to delve more deeply into organisations, this paper adopts a more granular perspective on integration activities by focusing upon the building blocks of organisations. Specifically we investigate ordinary routine amalgamation and their impact upon meta-routine outcome during acquisition integration. Drawing upon two longitudinal integration cases and using ‘retroductive’ analysis, two types of amalgamation are identified, namely ‘combination’ and ‘superimposition’. We find that, while the basic nature of routines, such as multiplicity and nestedness, inhibit routine amalgamation, external interference in the form of context, structural change or introduction of additional routines is needed to stabilise amalgamated routines. From our findings we are able to suggest a number of testable propositions about the factors that influence the amalgamation of routines. This empirical study contributes to the M&A literature by opening up the ‘black box’ of post-acquisition integration by providing details at a granular level of what actually happens during integrations.

Teacher colleges played a significant role in the preparation of teachers for over 100 years in New Zealand. Teacher training colleges opened in the 1880s and served as the main institutions for teacher preparation. Toward the end of the twentieth century, the plight of teachers’ colleges once again fell victim to the ‘decline and demand cycle’ for teachers. Fueled by discussions regarding the extent teacher training should be “practically based in the classroom”, new government directions and policy priorities for the preparation of the teaching workforce were implemented. All teacher colleges experienced either staged amalgamations or ultimate closure. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the preparation of teachers entered a new phase as the responsibility shifted to the university sector, which included the training of kindergarten teachers. While the policy rhetoric imagined this to be an amalgamation, the reality was a process fraught with a number of anxieties, not the least of which were the intellectual shifts.

The impact of globalization is undeniable; yet, it is so pervasive that we as researchers are still seeking answers to its impact and how to bring it to use most effectively. This chapter studies the role of global values in higher education of Pakistan and the amalgamation of global values in the practices of higher education institutions (HEIs) of Pakistan. For this purpose, 18 educational leaders and institutional heads of public and private HEIs of Pakistan were interviewed. Through thematic analysis, it was found that the educational leaders of Pakistani HEIs believe that global values such as integrity, creativity, fairness, unity, freedom, connection, sustainability, empowerment, reverence for life, human rights, civil rights, mutual trust, and honesty are responsible for harmony and peace in the world, and that universities are the best centers for promoting these values. However, they had concerns regarding Colonization by Western Values and conservation of national, regional, cultural, and religious values within a nation state.

In 1993, the Sports Council's new policy document, Women and Sport, recommended that all national governing bodies of sport ‘establish a single governing body’. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, almost all women sports that were administered separately to their male counterparts therefore ‘merged’ with the men's governing body: squash in 1989, football and athletics in 1992, lacrosse and hockey in 1996 and cricket in 1998. In practice, these mergers became ‘takeovers’, whereby female administrators were forced to cede governance of their sports to male-run bodies whose priority and focus remained men's sport. Work has been conducted on the impact of this process on individual sports, while internationally, studies of similar amalgamations between men's and women's sporting organisations have found that such processes increase male control at the expense of female autonomy. However, there has been no study which considers the impact of the Sports Council's policy on the UK sporting landscape as a whole. Via use of oral histories and archival material, this chapter seeks to begin this process, assessing the impact of a government policy of forced integration of women's and men's sport, which still has potent ramifications in sport governance today.

We utilise the problem of dirty hands to consider the ethical dimensions of commissions of inquiry, particularly commissions of inquiry conducted for the purposes of public policy. The Independent Local Government Review Panel (ILGRP) in NSW is used as an example for the purposes of discussion. Four questions endemic to considerations of dirty hands are derived from Coady (2014). The framework affords various insights into the ethical terrain of this particular inquiry and those undertaken for the purposes of public policy more generally. We argue that commissions of this type and the ILGRP in particular cannot be labelled examples of dirty hands and that the concept of determinatio from the work of St Thomas Aquinas sheds light as to the nature of moral claims around commissions. We also argue that a fruitful analysis is afforded by Wallis’ (2013) analytic framework of the ‘logic of fateful choices faced by the leaders of commissions of inquiry’. Nevertheless, confusion surrounding the nature and types of inquiries is partially responsible for accusations of their ethical incoherence.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) involving cities and municipalities have received little research attention. This is unfortunate because cities are fundamentally important in the global economy and their influence is likely to grow further. This chapter takes stock of extant research and offers an agenda for studying city M&A. The authors outline the dominant strategic perspective, and complement it with human and institutional perspectives that help explore these complex phenomena. Finally, the authors consider what the M&A literature at large can learn from studying cities.

Australia notably was one of the few developed nations to avoid a technical recession subsequent to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). However, the fact that the nation escaped a technical recession doesn’t mean that citizens and local governments were not subject to some of the measures associated with post-GFC austerity. In particular, intergovernmental grants – an important source of revenue for Australian local governments – were frozen by the federal government seeking to mitigate large deficits over the forward estimates. This chapter compares and contrasts the budgetary outcomes for the local governments of Australia’s two most populous states – New South Wales and Victoria. We find that the disparate regulatory controls in the two municipal jurisdictions were strongly associated with the budgetary outcomes of the individual municipalities: In particular, we present evidence which suggests that taxation limitations and lax investment guidelines in New South Wales can be associated with relatively inferior budgetary positions and higher budgetary volatility. By way of contrast, Victorian councils had the flexibility to vary rates of taxation to the changing conditions and largely avoided investment losses associated with the financial failure of Lehman Brothers. In New South Wales the regulatory response to deteriorating municipal budgets (subsequent to the GFC) has been to execute a radical programme of forced amalgamations. Somewhat ironically, the Victorian state government has recently imposed taxation limitations on its municipalities. In summary, this chapter demonstrates the saliency of regulatory constraints on municipal resilience, in the context of post-GFC economic challenges.

The chapter reviewed the system of government introduced by the colonial masters into Nigeria and the legacy they left, which was, unfortunately, the basis of the postcolonial government structures. It compared these to the achievement of the system from the precolonial. A major discovery is that the British government did not consider the diverse culture, history, and background of the various ethnic groups they met before implementing a form of governance to replace the pro-colonial government structure (Siollun, 2021). The error was in amalgamating diverse ethnic groups with different government structures, cultures, and beliefs into a single nation without preparing the ethnic groups for the shock that such a move entailed. Countries such as Singapore and the United States of America have brought together people with diverse cultures, beliefs, and modes of governance. Still, the structure after the emergence of the nation was such that all the ethnic groups were considered while designing such a structure. The chapter concluded that while the British government met people with a nationalistic ideology based on common goals, they left a nation where nationalism was based on ethnicity, regionalism, and political belief, making the country divided and unable to maintain the precolonial benefits of governance. Unfortunately, the division has been taken to a dangerous level in the postcolonial era.

The central place that education has in the strength and well-being of any profession is widely accepted. Australia presents an interesting case study of a country where Library and Information Studies (LIS) education moved from being conducted by practitioners under the guidance of the professional association to being provided in institutions of higher education in 1959. The 50 years (1959–2008) saw substantial changes in Australian LIS education with a rapid proliferation of schools which was later followed by closures, mergers and changes of focus. This chapter charts LIS education during this period focusing on organizational and structural aspects of the placement of LIS education in tertiary institutions, on the academization of LIS educators who had in the early days mainly been drawn from practice, and on the development of LIS educators as academic researchers and authors as represented by their productivity and visibility in national and international databases. In addition to giving an account of these areas of LIS education over the 50 years, the chapter seeks to offer explanations for what has occurred and some views of strategies which may assist the development of LIS education in Australia and in other countries which possess similar characteristics.