Cross-border mergers/acquisitions: a review and research agenda

Cross-border mergers/acquisitions account for the bulk of contemporary foreign direct investment. Their significance, which is reinforcing the position of transnational corporations as the dominant institutional force in the global economy, is related to the nexus of processes implicated in international economic restructuring. Cross-border mergers/acquisitions are, therefore, important influences upon the evolution of the space economy, but this perspective on merger/acquisition activity has been neglected in academic research. This review makes connections between disparate literatures to identify potential lines of enquiry and attempts to situate these lines of enquiry within current research agendas in economic geography. On a basic level, mergers/acquisitions create new corporate geographies which represent valid objects of research in the geography of enterprise tradition. However, these corporate geographies are set within the institutional context of social, economic, and political relations. Many of the most interesting research questions derive from these contextual relations which are addressed with reference to issues of embeddedness at various geographical scales and also by linking these issues to aspects of employment and territorial development.