The purpose of this article is to compare within-family successions and external-party takeovers in family-owned manufacturing SMEs to determine potential differences in how they are perceived and managed. This paper focuses on two long-term aspects of family businesses – their succession and...

Purpose Companies often aspire to create advantages for their businesses through acquisitions. Their participation has increasingly been documented to include different motives for acquirers, while focusing less on the ambitions of acquired parties with the acquisitions. The purpose of this...

Purpose – An important task following international acquisitions is to coordinate customer relationships; that is, to organise customer interfaces and possibly establish new relationships between customers and the acquirer/the acquired party. Yet, such coordination may prove to be problematic,...

Purpose The literature has described knowledge transfer in terms of how companies advance their merger and acquisition activities through experience. This indicates a knowledge transfer from one acquisition to the next, with the acquiring party being the carrier of such knowledge. The present...

Purpose While existing literature extensively explores manufacturing firms expanding into services, little is known about the modes of servitisation, the means by which they carry it out. This paper concentrates on acquisitions as a mode of servitisation. Post-acquisition integration is when the...