摘要：Corporate restructuring and, more specifically, corporate refocusing or corporate unbundling, have received extensive coverage in management journals, books and the business press in general since the early 1980s. These factors have resulted in a major shift in the industrial organization landscape, characterised by the de-institutionalisation of the conglomerate firm, or the firm-as-porifolio' model. Although lagging the rest of the world (as a result mainly of political factors and the closed nature of the South African economy until the 1990s), South Africa has been no exception, and numerous corporate unbundlings have taken place since 1993. However, the corporate refocusing phenomenon has received relatively little research attention from business policy academics to date, despite its prevalence. In particular, little or no work has addressed the actual process of refocusing and its internal organisational and decision-making dynamics. The aim of this article is to develop, on the basis of existing theory, a conceptual model through which corporate refocusing or unbundling processes can be analysed. A follow-up article will address the internal organisational dynamics of such processes.
