The Disintegrating Effects of Equality: A Study of a Failed International Merger
研究两家北欧国有电信公司并购案例，发现平等原则在资源分配和决策规则中反而阻碍了社会整合，导致并购失败。
In the literature on M&A and social justice, equality is regarded as an important principle to facilitate social integration. This article debates what happens when the equality principle is operationalized; from intentions in the pre‐merger process to the distribution of resources and decision‐making rules in the post‐merger process. In a merger between two state‐owned telecoms corporations in the Scandinavian countries, we found that the principle of equality had the reverse effects on social integration to that predicted in the literature. Instead of facilitating the social integration process, the equality principle led to perceptual and structural fallacies negatively influencing social integration. We suggest that these disintegrating effects were particularly strong because this was an international merger between two state‐owned firms of unequal size.