Research focus areas

Research on controllership addresses all activities of controlling departments in companies, which covers a broad spectrum of controlling and can thus be considered a core area of German empirical controlling research. Future and already initiated research in the field of controlling addresses, among other things, financial controlling up to personnel controlling (i.e. a functional view), budgeting up to strategic planning (instrumental view) as well as the task of providing information up to the critical counterpart or business partner (institutional view or actor focus), as well as their respective influence on the success of the company. Overall, this emphasizes the central interface function of controlling and the close connection to other organizational units in the company.

Management Control Systems comprise all control systems available to management to align the activities of all employees with the objectives of the company. The goals of the company can be profit, sustainability or social contribution. Management control systems include, for example, cultural controls (Ouchi 1977), boundary controls (Simons 1995), or process controls (Chenhall 2003). MCS research represents a core discipline of international management control research.
The general goal of MCS research at the Department of Controlling is to contribute to anchoring internationally relevant research in Germany and, in turn, to contribute to international MCS research from Germany.

Research at the Department of Controlling is not limited to exclusive controlling research. Rather, in accordance with the interdisciplinary orientation of the University of Kassel and the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, a linkage with related topics is to be ensured. A completed exemplary project with Prof. Dr. Utz Schäffer, Dr. Christian Fikus and Prof. Dr. Matthias Meyer deals with a survey-like understanding of finance research. Using the bibliographic method of citation and co-citation analysis, the most important research clusters of all publications in the four highest ranked finance journals (Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Economics) for the period 1988-2007 were identified in order to test the thesis of a narrowing research with increasing blindness to current topics, which had found many adherents especially during and after the financial crisis. For this purpose, a total of 4,064 articles were analyzed and over 130,000 citations were manually checked for correctness and cleaned up (23,000). Against the backdrop of the current global economic and financial crisis, it is interesting to note that the criticism of the rigidity of finance and economics research voiced by Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, among others, cannot be substantiated. On the contrary, it is evident that numerous new research clusters have emerged over the course of the analysis period that are home to new research approaches. The project also provides an objective overview of the internal structure of finance research that has not been available in the international literature to date.