M&As and Alliances
Helene L. Colman, BI Norwegian Business School, Norway
Arjen Slangen, KU Leuven, Belgium
Providing internationalizing firms with quick access to complementary knowledge, skills, and networks, cross-border mergers, acquisitions, and alliances have become increasingly popular modes of foreign expansion over the past decades. This conference track welcomes papers that address various aspects of these expansion modes, ranging from their antecedents to their implementation process and their outcomes. The track is open to conceptual as well as empirical papers using a variety of theories, both economic and behavioral ones, not only from the domain of international business but also from adjacent domains such as strategic management, economics, economic geography, political science, psychology, and sociology. Papers should ideally make substantive theoretical contributions to existing international business research on mergers, acquisitions, and alliances, whether through deductive or inductive approaches. Potential research questions that authors submitting their papers to this track could address include: What determines a firm’s choice for either of these expansion modes vis-à-vis others and to what degree is their occurrence interrelated due to factors such as organizational learning and mimicry? Which challenges or barriers do firms implementing them face, whether cultural, (geo)political, spatial, or financial? What consequences do these challenges or barriers have for knowledge transfers, inter-partner learning, employee relations, financial performance, or the external environment in which the chosen mode is embedded? Fine-grained answers to these and other research questions will further inform international business scholars and practitioners of the workings of these collaborative modes.
Keywords
Mergers and acquisitions, alliances, antecedents, implementation process, outcomes.