This paper argues that knowledge on 'organizational culture' has acquired authority and constitutes a 'truth' on mergers, a truth imbued with both enabling and constraining power effects. Taking a Foucauldian perspective, the paper theorizes 'organizational culture' as a discursive formation that is implicated in a regime of truth. This regime has involved a process of disciplinary normalization in merger integration with the result that 'culture' has become naturalized to 'organization'. Drawing on ethnographic research into merger integration, these arguments are illustrated through two vignettes titled 'surveillance' and 'sanctuary'. These represent the reproduction of, and resistance to, the truth effects of 'organizational culture'. The implications of critically examining 'organizational culture' in this way are twofold: first, it opens up space for other merger discourses, and second, it enables positioning of merger accounts within cultural discourses in a way that forwards productive rather than divisive effects in theory and practice.

International mergers and acquisitions (M&As) often invoke national identification and national cultural differences. We argue that metonymy is a central linguistic resource through which national cultural identities and differences are reproduced in media accounts of international M&As. In this paper, we focus on two revealing cases: the acquisition of American IBM Personal Computer Division (PCD) by the Chinese company Lenovo and the acquisition of American Anheuser-Busch (A-B) by the Belgian-Brazilian company InBev. First, we identify the forms, functions, and frequencies of national metonymy in media accounts of these cases. We present a typology that classifies varieties of national metonymy in international M&As. Second, we demonstrate how these metonyms combine with metaphor to generate evocative imagery, engaging wit, and subversive irony. Our findings show that national metonymy contributes to the construction of emotive frames, stereotypes, ideological differences, and threats. Combinations of national metonymy with metaphor also provide powerful means to construct cultural differences. However, combinations of metonymy with wit and irony enable the play on meanings that overturns and resists national and cultural stereotypes. This is the first study to unpack the deployment of metonymy in accounts of international M&As. In doing so, it also opens up new avenues for research into international management and the analysis of tropes in management and organization.

No abstract

While studies on international management have focused on cultural differences and examined institutional specificities in various national business systems, conceptions of international relations have been left relatively underexplored. We argue that representations of international relations are relevant to international M&As and contend that intertextuality offers a novel approach to examine these relational features of international management. Our analysis focuses on Sino-US relations in the context of the acquisition of American IBM's Personal Computer Division (PCD) by the Chinese company, Lenovo. We demonstrate the ways in which facets of international relations are produced in media accounts of this acquisition, and analyse the intertextual dynamics entwined with their production. The analysis consists of three sections: constitutive intertextuality, manifest intertextuality and intertextual ideological undercurrents. These illustrate the variation in producing international relations through discursive themes (threat to security/peaceful rise), emotion rhetoric (fear/cheer) and ideology (cold war/globalism). In summary, the paper elucidates the ways in which international M&As are immersed in a seascape of intertextual international relations.

No abstract