Dual Hierarchies of Organizational Transferability: A Six-Tier Ontology and Theory of Acquisition Failure Propagation
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Mergers and acquisitions destroy value at high rates because scholars and practitioners lack a shared ontology specifying which organizational layers transfer and how failures propagate across them. This paper develops a six-tier ontology of the acquisition target – Owner Intent, Business Model, Business Entity, Product, Process, and Organization – each with a distinct governor, specification surface, and transferability mode. The tiers form dual oppositely directed hierarchies: a service hierarchy upward from Organization to Intent and a constraint hierarchy downward from Intent to Organization. The constraint hierarchy determines integration sequencing; shocks propagate bidirectionally, generating seven falsifiable propositions about failure cascades. The framework is form-invariant across for-profit, NGO, cooperative, and state-owned entities via substitution rules, with Tier 2, 4, and 5 and the whole state-owned column provisional. The ontology connects siloed streams – cultural distance, executive turnover, business-model misfit, integration capabilities – under one transferability logic, explaining residual variance in meta-analyses (King et al., 2004, 2021). The primary contribution is a generalizable theory of organizational separability under ownership change, with implications for theory of the firm and dynamic capabilities. A Six-Tier Separability Diagnostic is derived as a theoretical implication; a companion large-N test bounds an adjacent structural claim to a pre-close screen for one failure mode, not a general predictor. Includes zharnikov-2026ag-dual-hierarchies-of-transferability.yaml (Paper Spec v0.1.0) – a machine-readable specification of the paper’s claims, assumptions, and dependencies. The paper’s full machine-first bundle (the SPINE claim/dependency graph and the ONTOLOGY term module) lives in the public repository; see github.com/spectralbranding/paper-spec for the standard. This PDF is generated programmatically from that machine-first source under a research-as-repository model.
Author: Zharnikov, Dmitry
Language: English
Subfield: Accounting
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7158167348