| dc.description.abstract | Thousands of organizations are merging every year, even though the consensus among scholars is that most, or at least a large part of them fail. And after decades of research into mergers there is no clear consensus as to what it would take to have a successful merger, all though many agree on a handful of success factors being important.
Even though there is a vast amount of research on mergers in general, I have found almost nothing about mergers in the performing arts industry. My thesis is looking into this industry, and what it takes to merge successfully here compared to other industries. I try to give an answer to the research question: What does it take to have a successful merger between performing arts organizations, and what are the challenges you meet along the way?
To do so I start by looking through general research about mergers, and also into theory about the performing arts industry and how it differs from other industries. I then look at the case of the merger into Kilden Performing Arts Centre (Kilden). Through indebt interviews with employees and managers I try to find out what have been the factors for success in the merger into this organization. I move on to see if these factors are likely to be the same for the whole industry, and from this I create a research model for a successful merger between organizations in the performing arts industry.
My findings are that some of the factors are the same in both general merger theory and in the performing arts industry. But two of the factors found to be important by scholars in other industries, “Accumulated Experience on M&As” and “Postmerger Integration Team”, were found to be unimportant in this industry. I also added four new factors that were found to be important in this case. These were “Premises”, “Organizational Growth”, “Working With Feelings”, and “Caring About the Product”. At least three of these, the first, third, and fourth, I believe to be especially important for the performing arts industry. | nb_NO |
