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This study aims to provide insights into gender diversity in Pakistani boardrooms, particularly for the dominant family business type, which is strongly guided by (non-financial) family-related objectives when making business decisions, such as the appointment of board members. Pakistani companies operate within the framework of weak legal institutions and a traditionally highly patriarchal environment. This study examines how corporate decisions regarding the appointment of female board members play out in this socio-political and cultural environment.

Board composition and board characteristics were examined using hand-collected data from 213 listed family firms and non-family firms on the Pakistan Stock Exchange from 2003 to 2017. Univariate analyses, probit regressions and robustness tests were performed.

Pakistani family firms have a significantly higher proportion of women on their boards than do non-family firms. They are also significantly more likely to appoint women to top positions, such as CEO or chairs.

Evidently, women are allowed to enter boards through family affiliations. Gender quotas appear an ineffective instrument for breaking through the “glass ceiling” in this socio-cultural environment. Thus, gender parity must entail the comprehensive promotion of women and the enforcement of legal reforms for structural and cultural change.

The analysis focuses on a Muslim-majority emerging Asian market that has been scarcely researched, thus offering new perspectives and insights into board composition and corporate governance that go beyond the well-studied Western countries.

This paper aims to explore the differing attitudes of salaried chief financial officers (CFOs) that can be associated with agency theory and stewardship theory. CFO attitudes are investigated because CFOs typically face additional agency conflict in their roles as overseers of the financial and accounting functions that are responsible for the production of numerical information used as a basis for incentive compensation.

A qualitative field study of 14 large privately held Austrian manufacturing companies was conducted. The findings rely on information retrieved from 18 semi-structured interviews conducted with individuals from these companies.

The findings reveal a number of contextual factors that influence stewardship and agency attitudes of salaried CFOs. CFOs, who mainly report formally to owners, perceive more control in the hands of the owners. Short-term management appointments appear to facilitate agency-like behavior, whereas the existence of owner–managers and the typical CFO's maturity in terms of age and wealth seem to nurture stewardship behavior.

Further (quantitative) research is needed to corroborate the findings in this study, which are derived from a qualitative research approach. Further research on agency and stewardship behavior should also include the view of principal with respect to agent actions, as this paper shows that principal opinion strongly affects the way agents perceive control.

The findings suggest that the behavior of company owners can influence and change a manager's agency or stewardship attitude. Owners who desire a culture of stewardship should set long-term goals and facilitate long-term management appointments. Moreover, owners can lower a manager's perceived level of owner control by adopting an active role in management.

This paper is the first to analyze stewardship and agency attitude of salaried CFOs in privately held companies. It, therefore, adds to the current literature on the role of the CFO, as well as to the literature on governance issues in privately held firms.

The purpose of this article is to comprehensively review the empirical literature on management accounting and control in family businesses and to identify future research avenues. Academic interest in the field of management accounting and control in family businesses has increased considerably during the past decade. Family businesses constitute a unique organisational form that apparently faces a lower degree of information asymmetry compared to non-family businesses. In turn, this may limit their need for management accounting and control systems. However, recent reviews of accounting in family businesses have not yet comprehensively reviewed the literature on management accounting and control. The present paper aims to close this gap.

This review follows the guidelines proposed by Tranfield et al. (2003) for conducting a systematic literature review. This paper has identified 33 relevant articles, which were scanned for findings on the antecedents, configurations and outcomes of management accounting and control in family businesses.

Management accounting and control seem to be generally less relevant to family businesses than to non-family businesses. This review suggests, however, that this finding is true primarily for smaller firms, not for larger firms. In family businesses, mutual trust, family-specific goals and the centralisation of power emerge as important antecedents of management accounting and control, but they are also affected by the use of management accounting and control instruments.

This paper identifies a need for more research concerning institutionalisation and the instruments of management accounting and control in family businesses. Future studies on this topic should include more demographic characteristics to isolate the family effect from other corporate governance effects, as this has been disregarded by most extant studies.

This paper is the first comprehensive review to provide a synthesis of the literature on management accounting and control in family businesses.