DaimlerChrysler: The story of a merger.

摘要

Mergers are of great interest to scholars of organizational communication because they are occurring so frequently and because they provide a way to investigate the central communication process such as culture and change. Specifically this dissertation seeks to explore how the Chrysler Corporation and Daimler Benz 1998 merger was at the time one of the largest mergers ever, both one of the largest, both in terms of financial resources and numbers of people. It draws on three separate bodies of scholarly work: mergers, culture, and applied communication.; This study focuses on three areas of communication. First, what communication strategies were used during pre and post merger. Second, an analysis of the metaphors employed and the effect they had on the corporations' audiences. Finally, the strategies they employed during the merger.; The results suggest that in the short term, the communication strategies where tremendously successful, both internally and externally. From a long-term perspective, however, there was no follow on to the initial message. Management failed to provide employees and to some extent, the media with updates regarding how the integration was progressing. The expectations created by the pre-merger discourse went largely unmet.; The discourse of the merger also failed to interact and capitalize on the larger (previous) meaning of Chrysler. One of the contributing factors to the success of an organization is how it interacts with its community. The reality of the merged company is that it is increasingly Daimler. Care should be taken to insure that the uses of overly positive and overly general metaphors do not take over the meaning of a merger, as occurred in this case.