5. Discussion and conclusions
Our findings demonstrate that management accounting is an important capability in international entrepreneurship, but that its role—and thus, the reliance on effectuation and causation—depends on the phase of the international entrepreneurship process. While our results suggest that management accounting—and thus, causation—is highly involved in the exploitation phase and an essential element in the continuous control of foreign operations, it seems to have only a minor role in the evaluation phase and in the decision to go international. In these earlier phases, effectuation logics seem to dominate. Accordingly, we find that management accounting is not involved at all in the identification of international opportunities, as all of our case firms enacted and not discovered their international entrepreneurship opportunities.
Our results also point to the notion that management accounting’s role—and thus, by trend also causation logics more generally—is more pronounced and valued the more resourceintensive and riskier the firms’ internationalization modes are and the more rapidly firms internationalize. Involving management accounting in international entrepreneurship appears more important for higher internationalization modes, especially for wholly-owned subsidiaries. This entry mode is related to the highest risk and resource commitment and thus—and in line with causation logics (Sarasvathy, 2001)—a proper evaluation of the intended internationalization strategy ex ante as well as the continuous control of the chosen strategy’s success ex post is expedient. Higher internationalization modes also go along with an increased level of complexity. To cope with the (more) complex business environment, professional structures are often required and one such professional structure is management accounting (Songini, 2006).
