Research Projects

My current research is depicted in the following cube. This cube has three dimensions that organize the research projects.

My current research projects are both on the meso-level and on the micro-level. In the following, each project is sketched and a link to a more thorough description is provided:

• Responsibility and Accountability are like Siamese twins. Those who are responsible are accountable. They should give accounts. Therefore, account giving is directed on the ascription of responsibility. In our research project, we developed a framework for analyzing account giving. This model is tested in different projects, for instance in the wake of the financial market crisis.
• Many corporations report about their social activities which increasingly are labelled as activities in Corporate Social Responsibility. In our research, we assume that their communication about these activities target attitudes of their stakeholders. One project investigates in which respect stakeholders attribute different motives to the corporation when they read statements about their CSR policy. We theorize about the influence of attributed motives on the legitimacy of the corporation.
• With an international team of researchers we investigate Management Control Systems in different countries of Europe, Australia und Canada. General goal of this project is to explore different practices of management control and explain the variety of these practices with their different contexts.
• Since several years big corporations install special organizational units which deliver services for all business units (Shared Service Center). Most prominent are shared service center for accounting, finance, personnel management or information systems.