Economic, political, and social implications and processes around M&A

M&A can be reframed beyond a rational technocratic “eps” approach focused on the financial and strategic aspects of M&A towards understanding the EPS implications and processes involved around M&A. This chapter identifies some far-reaching EPS implications of M&A around market concentration, income inequality, and corporate and political power. The regulatory responses to this are a wave of sweeping changes to merger control and enforcement with policymakers increasingly seeking to incorporate sustainability into antitrust frameworks. Reimagining M&A more holistically around such EPS implications points to a need to reframe M&A as EPS processes. This involves reimagining stakeholder relationships before, during, and after M&A as dialectical processes. Structuration theory is drawn on.