The conglomerate may have declined, but multi-business strategy did not disappear.
At Academy of Management annual meeting this year, we bring together David Collis (Harvard Business School), Emilie Feldman (Wharton), Koen Heimeriks (Warwick Business School), Paul Nary (Wharton), and Arkadiy Sakhartov (Gies College of Business, UIUC) for a conversation on how corporate strategy is changing as value creation depends less on simply "owning" businesses and more on continuously reshaping how they are owned, governed, connected, and reconfigured.
The decline of the traditional conglomerate didn't eliminate multi-business organization - it transformed it. Corporate scope today is increasingly structured through financial sponsors, partial ownership stakes, sequenced acquisitions and divestitures, and collaborative arrangements that blur classic governance forms. This symposium brings together research on divestitures, private equity, asset redeployment, and interfirm collaboration to ask how contemporary forms of multi-business organization actually operate.
We will discuss questions such as:
- What has driven the decline of traditional conglomerates, and how does this relate to shifts in capital markets and technology?
- How do we conceptualize economies of scope when the economizing entity is a fund or platform rather than a firm?
- What constitutes organizational capability when it resides across ownership structures rather than within a single firm?
- How should we theorize governance when ownership and control systematically diverge?
If you are interested in corporate strategy, private equity, divestitures, ecosystems, platforms, or the changing boundaries of the firm, we would love to see you there.
📅 Sunday, August 2, 2026
⏰ 9:45–11:15 AM ET
📍 Philadelphia Convention Center, 108B
We are grateful to the AOM STR (Strategic Management) and TIM (Technology and Innovation Management) Divisions for sponsoring our symposium panel.
Organizers: Haiyang Zhang (Harvard Business School) and Deirdre Coveney (University of Leeds)
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Deirdre Coveney
Assistant Professor
University of Leeds
Leeds
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