SUMMARY
Over the previous decade, there has been an increase in the negative reaction against cross-border merger and acquisitions (M&A’s) all around the world from developed Western nations to emerging nations. In this paper, we develop the “environmental hostility” concept to study the emergence of negative reaction within the target country that the MNC enters. The conceptualization aims to go beyond the reification of the institutions, which is the general tendency in the literature focusing on the MNC. We aim to expose the dynamism in the institutional arenas and the way they are patterned through the study of hostility. Overall, we argue that environmental hostility is a function of perceived threat, scandal and mobilization in the target country. Keywords: Environmental Hostility, Cross-Border M&A, Deal Incompletion, MNC, Scandal, Institutional Theory