Mirror or no mirror? Architectural design of cross-border integration of Chinese multinational enterprises

With the increase in overseas acquisitions by Chinese multinational enterprises (CMNEs), corporations face the challenge of designing and building global architecture to enhance their performance in post-acquisition integration. A well-known design rule that CMNEs could follow is the mirroring hypothesis. However, the effectiveness of this hypothesis in aligning a CMNE’s organizational structure with the underlying technical system after acquiring a new subsidiary remains unclear. Using a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to analyze 34 cross-border acquisitions by CMNEs, we clarify the boundary conditions of the mirroring hypothesis and identify four archetypes of design patterns, namely, modularized mirroring, integral mirroring, mirror breaking, and mirror misted-up. We also identify the respective performance implications of these archetypes on the post-acquisition integration of CMNEs. This study presents a comprehensive assessment of the mirroring hypothesis and contributes to the discussion on global architecture design by emerging multinational enterprises in general.