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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2017

The "Value Creation'' and the Mergers and Acquisitions Market Market Intermediaries and Measurement Systems

Résumé

This communications examines the unprecedented rise in the number of corporate transactions in France since the 1990's. Studied from the point of view of economic sociology, it aims to analyse this rise as the construction of a mergers and acquisitions (M&A) market by professionals who are intermediaries in this market, namely bankers and business lawyers, financial consultants, investment funds and merchant bankers. It shows how these market intermediaries have developed the idea that a transaction can create value by using homogenised, normative measurement systems. The communication hypothesizes that the objective difference between the purchase price and sales price of a company, and therefore the ``value created'' should not be given as the starting point of the transactions market. On the contrary, it is this difference that should be examined from a sociological point of view. Yet, it cannot exist without there being different systems to calculate and optimise it. Each of the following systems contributes towards presenting the ``value'' of companies: financial accounting and its conventions; ratio analysis the profitability of investments, including Shareholder Value; company valuation methods, such as physically itemising them according to the way in which work is organised by different actors within the sector. Transactions and related decisions become possible thanks to a set of information that is standardised and shared, meaning that various companies, as well as other investments, can be compared. As with any other statistical operation, standardised quantifying based on conventional categories enables qualities to be compared, which otherwise would not be possible (Desrosières, 1993). As a result, within the M&A Mmarket, this raises questions related to constructing and using these systems for measuring the value of a company. Based on a recent survey into the mergers and acquisitions sector in France, which combined biographical interviews, workplace observations and secondary documentation, this communication will present an analysis of the role played by these company valuation systems in constructing this market. It highlights how these systems construct the idea that corporate transactions can create value, and how this idea together with the knowledge required to understand it, contribute towards the construction of a professional group, whose aim is to carry out transactions. In this way, the rise in the number of transactions over the past thirty years can therefore be explained less as a result of market forces, than as the product of social forces shaping and driving the market.
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Dates et versions

hal-03232412 , version 1 (21-05-2021)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-03232412 , version 1

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Valérie Boussard. The "Value Creation'' and the Mergers and Acquisitions Market Market Intermediaries and Measurement Systems. 29th Annual Meeting "What's Next? Disruptive/Collaborative Economy of Business as Usual ?, Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE), Jun 2017, Lyon, France. ⟨hal-03232412⟩
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