The Application and Role of Management Accounting and Controlling Methods in Family Businesses – Experiences of an Empirical Survey

One goal of this paper to overview systematically those theoretical works and research antecedents that started the phrasing of the research questions and the development process of the survey’s related questions. This way we set the criteria of the term ‘family business’ we followed here, the family businesses’ operations characteristics, with a special regard to the issue of family management and family control, and the main trends in the international literature of professionalization and succession (external and internal succession) closely tied to the application of management accounting and controlling methodologies. We want to show the details of the relation network between the family businesses’ long-term orientation, life cycle and growth, forming an appropriate base for introducing our empirical research analyses. Concerning data collection and data analysis, to have an integrated interpretation of the research findings we connected the values in objective and subjective perception, striving for revealing the broader interpretation possibilities of the phenomenon given besides statistical analyses based on formerly fixed variables. We followed the so-called explaining and structured type of the mixed methodology which consisted of a quantitative analysis period in the form of an online survey and a qualitative analysis period in the form of an in-depth interview data collection.