ABSTRACT

Like some other Western countries, Sweden is currently experiencing a trend towards fewer and larger authorities under the central government, resulting in a wave of mergers (The Swedish Agency for Public Management 2010). However, mergers in the public sector have attracted surprisingly little attention in the international body of literature on mergers and acquisitions. Instead of expanding the empirical horizon of these lines of research, it is assumed that conclusions based on a private context are valid for any societal context (Bringselius 2008, 2010). The case is similar in the social sciences in general. This nonrecognition of differences between the private and public sectors has led to many inaccurate generalisations (Perry and Rainey 1988). One reason for the inattention to the sphere of public administration in the literature on mergers, as well as in the social sciences in general, may be that such studies require knowledge found in a wider body of literature.