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It seems the EU is demanding additional concessions in the proposed EUR 56b acquisition of the US seed producer Monsanto by Bayer. The EU released a statement of objections which could lead to an obstruction for the merger. These further concessions would mean more conditions in addition to the announced divestment of a part of Bayer's seed and herbicide business to its competitor BASF.

In stigmatized industries characterized by social contestation, hostile audiences, and distancing between industry insiders and outsiders, firms facing media attacks follow different strategie's from firms in uncontested industries. Because firms avoid publicizing their tainted-sector membership, when threatened, they can respond by divesting assets from that industry. Our analyses of the arms industry demonstrate that media attacks on the focal firm and its peers both increase the likelihood of divestment for the focal firm. Specifically, attacks on the focal firm are the most consequential, followed by attacks on peers in the same industry subcategory, and by attacks on peers in different subcategories. These findings shed new light on divestment as a response to media attacks in stigmatized industries and lead us to rethink impression management theory.

This paper examines the implications of real options theory for both the decision to divest a business unit and the mode of divestment. It is shown that the decision to divest a business unit and the decision to engage in staged modes of divestment are both sensitive to uncertainty, consistent with a real options logic. However, in the face of uncertainty, the results suggest that staged forms of governance create real options that are of lesser value as compared to simply not divesting a business unit and also as compared to completely divesting a business unit. Thus, this study shows that firms have real options of varied value to choose from in the context of divestments.

The discipline of modern architectural conservation, within the field of post-war industrial heritage in Italy, continues to raise numerous questions, both methodological and design-related. Knowledge of this heritage remains only partially explored: some studies are limited to the diagnostic investigation and more rarely develop proposals for intervention. In the Campania region, the many abandoned factories represent an opportunity to test design strategies and integrated multiscalar visions. Through a preliminary overview of international practices and processes of adaptive reuse, this research seeks to outline possible approaches to intervention on selected examples by renowned authors in Campania: the Siag factory by Angelo Mangiarotti (1962), the former Dairy Factory by Luigi Cosenza (1968), and the former Olivetti plant (1972) by Marco Zanuso and Eduardo Vittoria. The aim is to refocus attention on conservation design in this field, fostering dialogue with other design disciplines.

Existing research into retailers’ foreign market exits has uncovered a number of drivers that lead multinational retailers to divest from certain countries. While scholars have investigated these drivers in isolation from one another, combinations of drivers that affect divestment decisions simultaneously remain under-researched despite scholars having indicated their importance and having called for a detailed, more holistic analysis. In this study, using a case study approach and qualitative content analysis of a wide variety of publicly available contemporary documents from different perspectives and experts, we investigate the drivers leading to all 32 country exits of the 50 largest grocery retailers in Europe in the 5-year period between 2014 and 2018. In line with previous research, the study shows the most frequent exit drivers are a low performance of the subsidiary, a low performance of the parent company, and a strategic refocus of the parent company. However, we demonstrate that for most exits, combinations of multiple interrelated drivers at the subsidiary level, the host-country level, and the parent level have a joint influence on retailers’ decisions to exit foreign markets. We also show that exits often include both failure-related drivers and strategy-related drivers. Furthermore, using the configurational approach, we identify exemplary combinations of market exit drivers that occur frequently and propose five archetypes of such combinations that suffice to explain all market exits in the dataset. For future research, we propose extending our typology through the application of a similar approach to different contexts and to use quantitative research based on the qualitative findings to generate more generalizable results.

We examine variation in the rate of divestment by multinational firms from Burma. We argue that in addition to a set of firm-level characteristics known to impact divestment decisions, firms are also influenced by characteristics of their home country and the divestment patterns of others. Using data on firms operating in Burma during 1996–2002, we model these multiple influences on firms to divest. Our results show that beyond firm-level concerns, firms divest in response to the political characteristics of their home country, including protest, the level of political freedom, and transparency of institutions. We also find that the centrality of their home country in the network of intergovernmental organizations impacts divestment patterns in interesting ways.

Most studies on problemistic search do not pay sufficient attention to how below-aspiration organizations decide what types of strategic actions to use to cope with performance shortfalls. In this study, we examine the preferences of multinational corporations (MNCs) for selecting foreign investment or divestment as a near-term solution to performance shortfalls. We first argue that foreign divestment is generally a more preferred performance solution. Drawing on the literature on vicarious learning, we further argue that MNCs are more likely to engage in foreign investment or foreign divestment to combat large performance shortfalls if peers recently and actively undertook the same type of strategic action. Moreover, they are less likely to undertake the other type of strategic action simultaneously because they adopt the satisficing principle and time constraints deter them from implementing multiple types of strategic action substantially. The analysis of the data about Japanese manufacturing MNCs reveals that vicarious learning influences MNCs’ selection preferences in certain conditions, thereby extending the literature on problemistic search.

We adopt a Penrosean perspective to study the effect of rapid international expansion on the subsequent divestment of international operations. We draw on regional strategy theory and differentiate Penrosean managerial resources by their geographical fungibility to argue that the effect of rapid international expansion on the divestment of international operations varies with the regional patterns of firms’ international expansion and international experience. We test our hypotheses using two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimation on data that capture the international expansion and divestment of retailers over the period 2003–2012.

Extant literature on divestment has repeatedly found that firms are likely to divest their poorly performing operations. In this paper, I consider how product market relatedness and geographic market differences in growth, policy stability, and exchange rate volatility can moderate the negative relationship between performance and divestment. Results from a comprehensive panel of U.S. multinational corporations (MNCs) reveal that conventional arguments about poor performance hold for both related and unrelated firm operations in countries characterized by low growth, policy stability, and exchange rate stability. However, the results also show that there are significant differences across the divestment decisions of firms for their related and unrelated foreign operations in countries characterized by high growth, policy instability, and exchange rate volatility. Although poor performance has been called the most significant predictor of divestment, this paper considers how interactions across multilevel factors influence the divestment decisions of firms and reveals how U.S. MNCs respond to both product and geographic market characteristics when making divestment decisions for their foreign operations.