Corporate acquisitions are typically studied as isolated events, potentially underestimating their embeddedness in broader business contexts and connections to other acquisitions. As disruptive events that can cause abrupt interruptions to ongoing business, acquisitions may have effects extending far beyond the consolidating parties. This chapter proposes an event-centred analytical framework for understanding industry dynamics around acquisitions. Inspired by event system theory and studies on business network dynamics, we develop four analytical approaches: discrete events, event clusters, event chains, and nets of intersecting event chains. These concepts extend temporal perspectives beyond individual acquisitions to examine co-occurring acquisitions during limited periods, sequences of acquisitions by serial acquirers, and complex structures where multiple acquisition chains intersect over time. Using data from 719 acquisitions in the Swedish IT industry (1994–2003), we demonstrate how these approaches reveal dramatically different views of competitive environments. The analysis shows that some acquisitions appear isolated, while others belong to clusters or chains, with the most complex forming nets of intersecting event chains connecting 142 acquisitions across 43 chains. This contextual approach offers insights into the complexity surrounding acquisitions and provides researchers and managers with analytical tools to better understand the temporal and spatial context of strategic actions.