Dual Hierarchies of Organizational Transferability: A Six-Tier Ontology and Theory of Acquisition Failure Propagation

Mergers and acquisitions continue to destroy value at high rates because scholars and practitioners lack a shared ontology specifying which organizational layers are transferred and how failures propagate across them. This paper develops a six-tier ontology of the acquisition target – Owner Intent, Business Model, Business Entity, Product, Process, and Organization – each characterized by a distinct governor, specification surface, and transferability mode. The tiers form dual oppositely directed hierarchies: a service hierarchy running upward from Organization to Intent and a constraint hierarchy running downward from Intent to Organization. The constraint hierarchy determines integration sequencing; shocks propagate bidirectionally, generating seven falsifiable propositions about failure cascades. The framework is form-invariant across for-profit, NGO, and cooperative entities via explicit substitution rules, with Tier 2, 4, and 5 substitutions provisional. The ontology connects previously siloed streams – cultural distance, executive turnover, business-model misfit, and integration capabilities – under a single transferability logic, explaining residual variance documented in meta-analyses (King et al., 2004; King et al., 2021). The primary contribution is a generalizable theory of organizational separability under ownership change, with implications for theory of the firm and dynamic capabilities. A Six-Tier Separability Diagnostic is derived as a theoretical implication; propositions carry confirming and falsifying criteria. Includes zharnikov-2026ag-six-tier-ontology.yaml (Paper Spec v0.1.0) – a machine-readable specification of the paper's claims, assumptions, and dependencies. The paper's full machine-first bundle (the SPINE claim/dependency graph and the ONTOLOGY term module) lives in the public repository; see https://github.com/spectralbranding/paper-spec for the standard. This PDF is generated programmatically from that machine-first source under a research-as-repository model.