Cultural differences are often used as explanations of organizational problems following mergers. This paper argues that this literature is to a large extent based on a realist epistemology where too little emphasis has been placed on the constructive processes. To partially bridge this gap, this study adopts a sensemaking approach to studying the (re)construction of cultural conceptions in the merger context. The study is based on extensive ethnographic material from eight cases of Finnish-Swedish mergers and acquisitions. The analysis of this material leads to a specification of three concurrent cultural sensemaking processes through which the top decision makers involved in the post-merger integration processes make sense of and enact cultural conceptions. First, this cultural sensemaking involves a search for rational understanding of cultural characteristics and differences. Second, cultural sensemaking also includes more or less suppressed emotional identification with either of the merging sides. Third, cultural sensemaking also involves purposeful manipulation of the cultural conceptions for more or less legitimate purposes. Based on this distinction, this study leads to specific propositions concerning how cultural conceptions are formed in post-merger organizations.

Variance theories have dominated corporate political action (CPA) research since the pioneering works in 1970s and 1980s. Process theories offer entirely new perspective to CPA research, as they are able to explain processes across number of levels of analysis and link actions to contexts. We add to the existing CPA literature by offering a process model that can be useful especially in historical and evolutionary analysis. Our model depicts CPA as a complex system, in which firms ’ actions are affected by various factors across organizational, industry and institutional levels of analysis. As political actions also influence these factors, the process is in essence systemic and path dependent. Our model supplements existing research by offering possibilities to explain long-run consequences of CPA vis-a-vis wider societal changes and by promoting more longitudinal research strategies.

incentive effects of executive pay. His work on this and more general international corporate governance issues has yielded papers in the AMJ and JIBS. Azura Shahrim is a PhD candidate at Leicester De Montfort University, England. Her thesis considers whether German executive share option schemes are an example of the ‘Americanisation ’ of international corporate governance, or whether they are a cosmetic device to conceal underlying governance that is virtually unchanged and still essentially ‘German’. Contrasting systems of corporate governance persist internationally but are subject to regulatory and firm-level institutional change. Such changes may be viewed as organizational innovations, often imported from the USA in the face of different national cultures. This paper analyses the implications of national culture for the translation of innovations, and provides case study illustrations of regulatory and firm-level governance changes experienced in Germany. These illustrations demonstrate that the diffusion of both kinds of change has been subject to substantial translation that is consistent with German national culture.

global strategy