Differences in Management Accounting Between Family Enterprises and Non-Family Enterprises : A Statistical Approach

Management accounting deals with the subject family enterprises rather little in spite of its high economical relevance. This paper questions, weather general objectives of family enterprises differ from those of non-family enterprises. Based on the hypothesis that family enterprises aim at humane objectives to a greater extent and at financial objectives to a lesser extent than non-family enterprises the results of an empirical study for the region Upper-Austria are presented. The conclusion is that apart from the extent of return on equity objectives of family enterprises do not differ much from those of non-family enterprises. The second point of interest is to analyse differences in objectives between medium and large sized enterprises