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Based on a sample of 230 M&A between 1981 and 2007, Jan-Peer Laabs challenges the short-term return behavior of acquirers in this industry in contrast to their long-term performance based on capital market and financial accounting information. A clearly negative yet consistent perspective on the long-term value creation potential emerges across the different empirical analyses. An additional case study on the takeover of Siemens VDO by Continental AG offers a number of valuable key success factors and insights on how to evade the negative return destiny.
Many family businesses refrain from using management consultants to support their strategic decision making. But why do some of them use consultants? And what are the reasons not to use management consultants? This book highlights under which conditions consultants are seen to be helpful and when they are rejected. It researches the use of management consultants in family businesses from different perspectives of organizational boundary research. Family businesses vary from each other. Family generation of owner & management, family influence, goal divergence among owners, and complexity are important dimensions that distinguish family businesses in their use of management consultants. This book helps family business managers and owners to understand when the use of management consultants is beneficial to them and when they should refrain from using consultants. Furthermore, it supports management consultants in tailoring their support to specific family business situations. This research is based on an innovative paper-based conjoint experiment with top managers of large German family businesses analyzing more than 1,700 decisions to use management consultants.
In discussing a management topic, scholars, educators, practitioners, and the media often toss out the name of a theorist (Taylor, Simon, Weber) or make a sideways reference to a particular theory (bureaucracy, total quality management, groupthink) and move on, as if assuming their audience possesses the necessary background to appreciate and integrate the reference. This is often far from the case. Individuals are frequently forced to seek out a hodgepodge of sources varying in quality and presentation to provide an overview of a particular idea. This work is designed to serve as a core reference for anyone interested in the essentials of contemporary management theory. Drawing together a t...
Management consultants of various kinds play an important role in the world of business, and within other types of organization. The Oxford Handbook on Management Consulting is a comprehensive overview of thinking and research on management consultancy with contributions from leading international scholars. The first section provides an account of the historical developments in management consulting research, and how current thinking has evolved from prior work. The second section focuses on disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, their diversities, areas of synergy, and parallel concerns. The following sections examine consulting as a knowledge business, consultants and management fashion, and the relationship between management consultants and their clients. The Handbook concludes with an assessment of areas of future research and debate. By bringing together a wide range of research and thinking on management consulting across different disciplines, sub-disciplines, and conceptual approaches, the Handbook provides a comprehensive understanding of both current thinking and future directions for research.
Doing research means to bravely battle several challenges at once: not only do you try to come to grasps with your topic, conduct a useful project, and write it all up. You also serve as crucial motivator and hardest critic. You are expected to challenge yourself enough to grow, but not enough to lose your wits. And those are only two of the countless difficult balances to keep. No wonder that especially junior researchers feel exhausting stress, encounter intellectual and emotional cramps, and sometimes seemingly turn into thoroughly drained ghosts at the end of their research journey. If you are wary of your upcoming final academic project since you have seen how others have struggled, thi...
This book provides an in-depth analysis of strategic positioning efforts of firms in the German consulting market. In his work, the author applies strategic group theory to the German management consulting industry, and provides an empirical test of the performance effects of alternative positioning strategies of management consulting firms. At the core is its empirical research, specifically the analysis of the “service expositions”, through which consulting firms communicate the nature of their services to clients. In order to ascertain these service expositions, the author conducts content analysis of 233 consulting firms active in the German market. He then uses the findings in order...
Groundbreaking research illuminates the pivotal, problematic role of consultants in the nonprofit world. The nonprofit sector leans heavily on consultants to guide strategic planning, advise on fundraising strategy, gather data on program effectiveness and more. How Consultants Shape Nonprofits explores how consultants, while working diligently to customize solutions for their clients, reinforce status-quo practices and ideas while prioritizing the opinions of people in power (nonprofit funders, leaders, etc.) over those of lower-level staff and communities. Consultants thus leave unaddressed some of the most pernicious problems in the nonprofit sector. The book's important conclusions about the complex role of consultants in the nonprofit world are based on more than a year of ethnographic research and nearly 200 interviews with practitioners. Dr. Reisman concludes with guidance on how consultants, nonprofit leaders, and donors can better collaborate, and overcome traditional "blind spots" in the nonprofit-consultant relationship.
Ronald Dore places recent developments in Japan in the broader context of gradual changes in modern patterns of capitalism common to all industrial societies.
Societal Stress and Law draws attention to the social side effects of law by developing the sociological concept of society-level stress, a corollary of the concept of individual-level stress in the biological sciences. To encourage interest in societal stress, the book looks at (1) instances of law adopted by American states that the U.S. Supreme Court held unconstitutional and (2) actions by American states with regard to a proposal to amend the federal Constitution. The Court rulings and the proposed constitutional amendment were capable of producing societal stress because they were seen by a sizeable segment of the U.S. public as being incompatible with significant American traditions. ...
The author analyzes the multi-faceted phenomenon of top executive turnover from various theoretical angles and empirically shows how individual and organizational factors such as performance, compensation and gender relate to it. Managerial implications on how to deal with turnover in times of talent shortage are derived. The book contributes to turnover research in three distinct ways. From a corporate governance perspective, it inspects potential antecedents and consequences of top executive dismissal with a focus on firm performance consequences. Taking a labor economics view, it scrutinizes compensation structure as a likely antecedent of voluntary turnover. From an OB and HRM angle, it examines gender as a characteristic of top executives and possible antecedent of turnover.