IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/b/mtp/titles/0262133113.html
   My bibliography  Save this book

Diversification, Refocusing, and Economic Performance

Author

Listed:
  • Constantinos C. Markides

    (London Business School)

Abstract

During the 1980s a dramatic change in the evolution of the modern corporation took place. The phenomenon, which has been labelled "refocusing," "de-diversifying," "de-conglomerating," or simply "getting back to basics," has changed the terrain of American business. Diversification, Refocusing, and Economic Performance empirically examines the causes and consequences of this phenomenon from a corporate strategy perspective, uncovering the full scope and effects of corporate refocusing, its strategic logic, and the resultant managerial implications. Two key findings are that every firm has its own limit for diversification, beyond which profits will decline, and that there are certain similarities among those companies who choose to refocus. Starting right after the Second World War, many companies diversified widely, primarily in areas unrelated to their core businesses. In the 1980s, however, as corporate acquisitions and hostile takeovers ran rampant, this trend toward diversification and conglomeration began to reverse. Today, there is ample evidence that corporate managers are responding in significant numbers to takeover threats by shedding unlucrative divisions and subsidiaries and concentrating on boosting the core product lines that have been their company's bread-and-butter. Drawing on a data set of 250 of the top Fortune 500 companies, Constantinos Markides measures the extent of the refocusing phenomenon, proposes reasons for its current popularity, delineates the characteristics of firms that are refocusing, and discusses the effects of refocusing on company market value, profitability, and organizational structure.

Suggested Citation

  • Constantinos C. Markides, 1996. "Diversification, Refocusing, and Economic Performance," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262133113, April.
  • Handle: RePEc:mtp:titles:0262133113
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ihsan Yigit & Nihal Kartaltepe Behram, 2013. "The Relationship Between Diversification Strategy and Organizational Performance in Developed and Emerging Economy Contexts: Evidence from Turkey and Netherlands," Eurasian Business Review, Springer;Eurasia Business and Economics Society, vol. 3(2), pages 121-136, December.
    2. Christian Le Bas & Pari Patel, 2005. "Does internationalisation of technology determine technological diversification in large firms?," SPRU Working Paper Series 128, SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex Business School.
    3. Michael Stephan, 2010. "Does Outsourcing Result in the Outsourcing of Technological Competencies? An Empirical Analysis of the Effect of Vertical Specialization on the Technological Competence Base of Firms," management revue - Socio-Economic Studies, Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, vol. 21(3), pages 308-331.
    4. Richard Whittington & Andrew Pettigrew & Simon Peck & Evelyn Fenton & Martin Conyon, 1999. "Change and Complementarities in the New Competitive Landscape: A European Panel Study, 1992–1996," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 10(5), pages 583-600, October.
    5. Ming zhu Wang, 2023. "Changes in industry and corporate effects in the United States, 1978–2019," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 44(2), pages 477-490, February.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G30 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - General
    • G34 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Mergers; Acquisitions; Restructuring; Corporate Governance

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:mtp:titles:0262133113. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kristin Waites (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://mitpress.mit.edu .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.