The CEE Generics Pharmaceutical Sector: Ways to Minimise Cultural Heritage Barriers to Mergers and Acquisitions
Mergers and acquisitions (M&As), which became extremely common in the branded industry in the 1990s, have recently seen a parallel development in the generics medicines industry. However, generics M&As are more susceptible to impact from cultural barriers. These may become apparent post merger, but can also dramatically affect the success of the negotiations. The reasons for this are discussed and several proposals are made for risk reduction through recognising the importance of the culture differences in play and taking adequate measures to reduce their impact.
Mergers and Acquisitions: Managing Culture and Human Resources
Roughly 20 years ago, Business Week (Prokesch et al., 1985) ran a cover story questioning whether mergers “really worked,” focusing on the extent to which the organizational combination strategy actually enhanced such desired outcomes as market share, profitability, and shareholder value. The analysts’ conclusion was “not very often.” During the subsequent two decades there has been a literal avalanche of work, by scholars and practitioners alike, delving into the nuances, subtleties, and dynamics underlying the merger and acquisition (M&A) process, with an eye toward enhancing our understanding of this complex strategy and improving M&A performance. The literature is too voluminous to even reasonably cite, but a few oft-noted works include Buono and Bowditch (1989), Haspeslagh and Jemison (1991), Hitt, Harrison, and Ireland (2001), Jemison and Sitkin (1986), Mirvis and Marks (1992) and Schweiger (2002). Yet despite all of this work and related intervention, a recent Business Week cover story (Henry and Jespersen, 2002) reached essentially the same conclusion as its 1985 counterpart, pointing out that M&As continue to wreak havoc on organizations, often destroying shareholder value in the process.
The uprising of the marginalised: a socio-economic perspective of the Syrian uprising
More than three years after the outbreak of protests in a number of Arab countries, the role of socio-economic factors in these events is attracting more attention. One of the cases that needs more research is Syria. More than three years into the Syrian uprising, the socio-economic roots of the protest movement that became one of the bloodiest civil conflicts in the history of the Middle East need to be examined. While it has been observed that the Syrian uprising, contrary to some ‘Arab Spring’ countries, has been an uprising of more marginalised social groups with a strong role played by poorer segments in the society, particularly rural and rural-to-urban migrants, the socio-economic explanation for this is still underdeveloped. This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of this issue by examining the political and socio-economic compromise that underlined the rule of the Ba’th party in Syria for four decades and unpacking how a combination of internal and external shifts that started in the 1990s and intensified in the 2000s led to the erosion of this compromise, providing the background to the events that began in 2011.