Ekonomistyrning och Ägande
Förändras ekonomistyrningen vid ett byte av ägarform?
The purpose of this thesis is to examine how the Management Control System is affected by a change in the owner structure from family owned to not-family owned. The study also tries to identify explaining factors behind the possible effects to the Management Control System. The study is based on a comprehensive case study on the company Alcro-Beckers which, in year 2001, was acquired from the owner Lindéngruppen fully owned by Ulf G Lindén. The acquirer was the non-family owned company Kemira OY, a Finnish stock listed group. The empirical foundation mainly comes from interviews conducted with people who were/are directly connected to the company, either as employees or as representatives for the owner. Information has also been gathered from written material such as annual reports, records from the board of directors meetings, documentation of objectives etc. The comprehensive empirical information collected from the studied company is structured around a theoretical framework consisting of Objectives, Strategies and Plans, Targets, Rewards and Feedback. The main findings shows that the most significant differences in the Management Control System that we have observed are that the objectives and the strategies have changed focus from being concentrated on expansion and long term thinking to being more concentrated on profitability in the existing operations. There are also, under the non-family owners, more financial targets and they are followed-up more closely and detailed. We have also observed five factors that constitute possible explanations to the changes in the Management Control System. The study shows that the organisation today, under the non-family owners, is bigger, more centralized and that the big, strategically and economically, decisions are taken further away from the management functions within Alcro-Beckers. The study also shows that the strategy for the company has changed and that the formal systems have expanded, both in size and number. The main conclusion of this essay is that we have seen changes within all the consisting variables in the theoretical framework for the Management Control System.