Changing Identities. From DiverseyLever to JohnsonDiversey: a Case of Cultural Integration

Abstract

The Diversey acquisition from the Unilever group was official the 1st April 1996. The final aim of this operation consisted in a merger between the new acquired company and Industrial Lever to create a new world leader reality in the industrial cleaning field. An acquisition process is in every case a complex event that generates a wide relational phenomenology. Two companies that work as competitors in a national market, through a ‘far’ decision of acquisition, a result of global strategies, have to start a strategic-organisational process of merger. All the acquisition and merger processes find the existence of a cultural problematic, that is linked to the identity processes of the implicated collective subjects.

Keywords

• corporate culture
• management
• global competition
• cultural integration
• merger and acquisition
• the diverseylever merger