Redefining organizational cross border cooperative strategies within economically integrated regions: The case of mergers and acquisitions and strategic alliances within the European Union

Bridging the gap between two mainstreams of research: The international management literature and the international economics literature, this dissertation attempts to attempts to expand the understanding of how regional economic integrations of countries affect the pattern and frequency of cross border cooperative strategies at the firm level. Regional economic integration has been a major area of research in the field of international economics and international trade. While the number of regional economic integrations around the world has experienced acceleration in numbers, theoretical and empirical research addressing their impact on multinational strategies has yet to catch pace with this increasing number of economic integrations. In this dissertation, I extend the study of cross border cooperative strategies by examining the effects of the environmental changes, resulting from economic integrations at the country level, on the patterns and structures of two forms of cooperative strategies: Cross border mergers and acquisitions and international strategic alliances. By building on the organization-environment relationship paradigm, I treat the integration of the European markets as a major change to the to the firm’s environment to suggest that such changes affect the pattern and structure of cross border cooperative strategies within the integrated area. In this study, I look at two major environmental changes associated with economic integrations: Market integration, adoption of a common currency. Therefore, the emergence and the adoption of the European Union policies at the country level and their effects on cross border cooperative strategies structures and patterns provide the context for pursuing the research questions addressed in this paper.

The study found significant support for the effect of countries’ economic integration on both the structure and pattern of mergers and acquisitions and strategic alliances, demonstrating that the study of cooperative strategies in terms of structure and pattern goes beyond the firm level.