Merger and acquisition announcements as corporate wedding narratives
Abstract
This study uses a discursive perspective to analyze the way in which top managers legitimize change in official announcements. It focuses on the foundations of legitimacy invoked using both Weber's typology, based on modes of authority, and the conventionalist model, stressing the constitutive frameworks that justify collective action. We use a narrative approach to examine four texts intended for employees in the context of mergers‐acquisitions in the Canadian financial services sector. We look at those announcements as wedding narratives. A framework based on the canonical schema and Greimas's actantial model was applied to the texts. The analysis reveals that these narrations of corporate marriages, while describing the same event, give distinct versions of it. These distinctions bring out differences between firms in terms of the foundations of legitimacy invoked, the contribution of the various actors, and the narrative style favoured.
Keywords
Citation
Demers, C., Giroux, N. and Chreim, S. (2003), "Merger and acquisition announcements as corporate wedding narratives", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 16 No. 2, pp. 223-242. https://doi.org/10.1108/09534810310468170
Publisher
:MCB UP Ltd
Copyright © 2003, MCB UP Limited