Towards More Sustainable M&A Deals: Scholars as Change Agents

Abstract

Mergers and acquisitions have significantly contributed to making the world globally connected, providing benefits from globalization through acquisition waves. Along with benefits, acquisitions have also accentuated many sustainability and responsibility issues that are central to both public discourse and global policies. Nonetheless, acquisition and sustainability research have evolved separately, as scholars have left sustainability and responsibility topics at the margin of the acquisition discourse. This impacts the ability of academics to affect practice through teaching by restricting available information. Scholars are important change agents for making more sustainable deals through their research, teaching, and public engagement. I specifically focus on research as it permeates both teaching and public engagement. I focus my analysis on five intertwined issues—long term orientation, stakeholder lens, linguistic turn, umbrella constructs, and the engaged scholarship research approach—that may conjointly foster such a change.