This is a so-called personal version (author's manuscript as accepted for publishing after the review process but prior to final layout and copyediting) of the article.

Despite the central role of legitimacy in social and organizational life, we know little of the subtle meaning-making processes through which organizational phenomena, such as industrial restructuring, are legitimated in contemporary society. Therefore, this paper examines the discursive legitimation strategies used when making sense of global industrial restructuring in the media. Based on a critical discourse analysis of extensive media coverage of a revolutionary pulp and paper sector merger, we distinguish and analyze five legitimation strategies: (1) normalization, (2) authorization, (3) rationalization, (4) moralization, and (5) narrativization. We argue that while these specific legitimation strategies appear in individual texts, their recurring use in the intertextual totality of the public discussion establishes the core elements of the emerging legitimating discourse.Key words: legitimation, discourse, media, industrial restructuring, globalization ‗Legitimacy' and ‗legitimation' play a central role in social action in general and organizational action in particular. In organization studies, legitimacy has been an important theme in several streams of research, but explicit analyses of legitimation are still scarce (e.g. Hybels 1995; Suchman 1995). We argue, in this paper, that there is a specific lack of knowledge concerning the discursive processes, practices, and strategies used to (re)construct senses of legitimacy/illegitimacy. Nevertheless, such knowledge is needed if we want to better understand the complex, but often subtle meaning-making processes through which organizational phenomena, such as industrial restructuring, are legitimated in contemporary society.As a step in this direction, we concentrate in this paper on the discursive legitimation in the media. By adopting a critical discourse analysis (henceforth CDA) perspective and by drawing on previous work by linguists on legitimation (Van Leeuwen and Wodak 1999), we focus on discursive legitimation concerning industrial restructuring. Our aim is to develop an empirically grounded model that will serve organization scholars in trying to understand the micro-level discursive strategies used in legitimating contemporary organizational phenomena. We focus on the media as an 3 important but still not very well-known legitimating arena for organizational phenomena.Our research question is the following: Authors nameWhat are the discursive strategies used when legitimating industrial restructuring in the media?We are consequently not looking at whether specific changes at particular points of time are seen as legitimate by any stakeholder group. Instead, we focus on the subtle discursive strategies that tend to construct a sense of legitimacy around these phenomena in the public discourse.In our analysis, we focus on a ‗revolutionary' Finnish-Swedish merger that paved the way for a series of cross-border mergers and acquisitions, fundamentally changing the international paper and pulp industry. This case created a lively debate in the F...

This paper presents an integrative model of the impact of cultural differences on capability transfer in cross-border acquisitions. We propose that cultural differences affect the post-acquisition capability transfer through their impact on social integration, potential absorptive capacity, and capability complementarity. Two dynamic variables – the use of social integration mechanisms, and the degree of operational integration of the acquired unit – are proposed to moderate the effects of cultural differences on social integration and potential absorptive capacity. The implications for acquisition research and practice are discussed. Journal of International Business Studies (2007) 38, 658–672. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400287

No abstract