Mergers & acquisitions research: A bibliometric study of top strategy and international business journals, 1980–2010

Abstract

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are important modes through which firms carry out their domestic and international strategies and have been noted as the CEOs favorite strategy. As a significant field of study, M&A-research has accumulated substantial knowledge. This bibliometric study examines the extant strategy and international business literature on M&As. Methodologically, we examined a sample of 334 articles published in sixteen leading management/business journals, during a 31 year periodfrom 1980 to 2010. The results provide a global perspective of the field, identifying the works that have had the greater impact, the intellectual interconnections among authors and works, the main research traditions, or themes, delved upon on M&A-related research. Structural and longitudinal analyses reveal the changes in the intellectual structure of the field over time. A discussion on the accumulated knowledge and future research avenues concludes this paper.

Three decades of strategic management research on M&As: Citations, co-citations, and topics

“…First, it contributes to gain a broad understanding of the accumulated knowledge on the topic of M&As as researched by strategic management scholars, complementing other literature reviews (e.g., Datta et al, 1992;Shimizu et al, 2004;Ferreira et al, 2014;Reddy, 2015aReddy, , 2015b. Specifically, it complements Ferreira et al's (2014) bibliometric study by narrowing the focus to strategic management research, using a single and dedicated outlet to strategic management studies.…”

“…The core purpose is helping to make sense, organize and explore what has been done in a certain topic, subject of study or discipline (Ferreira, 2011;Shafique, 2013;Ferreira et al, 2014).…”

“…For instance, bibliometric studies have focused on identifying the main authors in a field (Willett, 2007), the impact of a scholar in the discipline (Ferreira, 2011), the impact of a journal (Tahai & Meyer, 1999), the stock of knowledge in one domain (Ferreira et al, 2014), and the intellectual structure of a discipline such as strategic management (Ramos-Rodriguez & Ruiz-Navarro, 2004) and knowledge management (Ponzi, 2002). All these studies rely on different forms of examining citations and co-citations as primary inputs from a bibliographic dataset.…”

“…The main results denote that M&As have been examined from several theoretical foundations and although a focus using the Resource-Based View (RBV) has gained some momentum in the last decade (Ferreira et al, 2014), we identified contributions of the agency theory, institutional theory and transaction cost theory. The cluster analysis identified five main areas of concentration of research: strategic relatedness, post-M&A integration, competence-based, value creation in diversification and cross-fertilization of finance theory and corporate strategy.…”

A RELAÇÃO MATRIZ-SUBSIDIÁRIAS E A TEORIA DAS MULTINACIONAIS: um estudo bibliométrico

“…Volberda, Foss e Lyles (2010) desenvolveram um modelo capaz de identificar discrepâncias no campo de estudos sobre capacidade absortiva, a partir daí, propuseram sugestões para novos desenvolvimentos. Na área de negócios internacionais, destacam-se os trabalhos realizados por Ferreira et al (2014), que buscaram mapear os estudos sobre fusões e aquisições, e Ferreira et al (2011) …”