Verso una cultura del disinvestimento: efficienza, superiorità e conformità

Strategic management research has always been committed to portray divestitures just as a reaction to strategic mistakes or a change to earlier decisions. Yet, scholars have recently gauged that divestiture operations represent a keystone in firm value creation propelling change process. This article reviews existing research on divestiture classifying it into three schools of thought - firm efficiency, firm superiority and firm conformity – based on different assumptions and conceptualizations of firms and firm objectives. Moreover, it introduces a taxonomy of divestiture operations that accounts for their heterogeneous determinants, thus proposing to read divestiture no longer and not only as a sign of failure, but rather as a tool to create and preserve shareholders’ wealth.