Network brokers as a resource for ensuring acquisition integration

Nicola Mirc and Philippe Very

Chapter 16 in Handbook on International Alliance and Network Research, 2015, pp 413-437 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The chapter addresses the role of network brokerage in the integration of mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Brokers, as individuals that connect different unrelated sub-groups of a network, can play essential roles in M&A integration since their positions at the intersection of both organizations provides them with particular opportunities to promote inter-organizational relations during the post-acquisition period. This is particularly true for symbiosis acquisitions because they rely upon the deliberate emergence of interactions between partners. However, the identification of such actors and their characteristics has been largely neglected in existing research. We thus investigate in this chapter the properties and roles of such acquisition brokers, that is, actors who promote acquisition integration through the relationships they span across the boundaries of merging firms. In addition, as networks tend to evolve following an acquisition, the structural properties pertaining to each actor are likely to change, meaning that the population of acquisition brokers could change over the course of integration. Building on a longitudinal case study of a symbiosis acquisition, we identified acquisition brokers and their characteristics at successive points of time in order to understand how these evolve along the integration phase. Our findings lead us to extend the literature on human-related phenomena in merger integration, proposing a novel perspective on the notion of key people in M&As.

Keywords: Business and Management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/9781783475476.00024.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:15803_16

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().