During the 1980s a large number of food/tobacco manufacturing firms were actively engaged in major corporate restructuring through mergers, acquisitions, leveraged and management buyouts, and selloffs. This study focuses on the cumulative effect of restructuring activities on the firm's structure and performance. In particular, the study examines how the restructuring activities in the 1980s have affected the degree and direction of corporate diversification and their performance implications. Recent studies have suggested that firm performance is positively correlated with related diversification and proposed the pursuit of related diversification over unrelated diversification as the goal of recent corporate restructuring. The purpose of this study is to test these propositions in an industry-specific context. Two alternative measures are used to describe the diversity of the firm's businesses. The industry participation index counts the number of four-digit SIC industries the firm operates. The entropy index not only takes into account the number of industry segments in which a firm operates, it also gives weights to each segment according to its share in total sales. In addition to industry counts and the entropy diversification index, this research also incorporates descriptive and qualitative information on sample firms' acquisition and divestiture histories. Multiple performance measures are used to evaluate firm performance from the perspectives of different stakeholders. The results of this study indicate that the accepted wisdom about the nature of restructuring activities among large firms in the 1980s appears to be only partially true. While these firms in general concentrated on related diversification, this concentration was not coupled with widespread shedding of unrelated business lines. Instead, sample firms were more concerned about their competitive positions in both related and unrelated lines. Several distinct patterns of restructuring emerged from the restructuring activities, each representing a significant portion of the sample. No one group consistently outperformed all other groups. Instead, it is apparent that different restructuring strategies were based on firms' unique strengths and competencies.