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According to the Irish writer, Oscar Wilde, a second marriage is the “triumph of hope over experience”. Many mergers and acquisitions (M&As) could be cast in the same light. This paper aims to outline four crucial questions senior managers should ask before embarking on a merger or acquisition.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Repeated studies have found that more than 50 per cent of M&As destroy rather than create value. Companies wishing to embark upon a merger or acquisition should thus think carefully before signing and ensure that they have made an impartial and critical analysis of the price, financing of the deal, complementarity and the cultural differences between the two organisations. If senior managers did this systematically before popping the question, the business world would certainly see less heartbreak.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world’s leading organisations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

The megadimensional nature of the complex social systems of the twentieth century, and the increasing levels of interrelatedness, present the individual with a bewildering array of information sources and services.

As volunteering research in nonprofit organizations is growing significantly, the purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of volunteering drivers and work engagement on volunteer continuation will.

Building on empirical and theoretical perspectives, the authors hypothesized that work engagement mediates the relationship between volunteering drivers and volunteer continuation will. To verify our hypotheses, we examined data collected from 372 active volunteers from Palestinian nonprofit organizations. The authors conducted structural equations modeling (SEM) analyses using the AMOS 24 platform to investigate direct and indirect effects.

The results of the study show that work engagement is a significant predictor of volunteer continuation will; mediates the relationship between career driver of volunteering and volunteer continuation will; and mediates the relationship between the protective driver of volunteering and volunteer continuation will.

The research design limits establishing cause and effect relationships among the examined variables.

The results of the current study may be of use for nonprofit organizations managers formulating effective recruitment and training policies to retain their volunteers.

The paper contributes to the limited empirical body of the volunteering research. The study is novel as it is one of the few studies conducted using data coming from a non-western context.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that the function of history in critical marketing studies centres on the issue of contextualisation. It aims to put forward the idea that historically informed critical marketing studies highlight that key institutions, actors and scholarly writings have all helped to constitute, perform and destabilise marketing theory, thought and practice in ways that reflect multiple constellations of interests.

By way of an engagement with various strands of the literature, it is suggested that the history of marketing thought and marketing history are riven with power relations. They include economically derived power relations and culturally significant changes in the social environment. However, while important, they are only part of a more pluralistic tapestry of factors that come from sometimes completely unrelated areas that helped constitute the conditions which fostered a given area of inquiry, debate and so on, in marketing and consumer research.

Weaved into accounts such as those articulated within critical marketing studies are attempts to rethink aspects of theory, concept formation, thought, practice and institutions that have assumed a taken‐for‐granted status.

This account is based on a detailed reading of interdisciplinary debates read into the history of marketing thought and marketing history.