The main purpose of this master thesis is to examine the family business succession process. Consequently the main focus targets family business succession associated with economic and tax issues. Secondly, there is a main focus on the social and therefore emotional relation which comes along with business succession within the family. Due to the fact that an essential part of international enterprises are family business and the involved circumstance that those businesses have to be committed, this field of study constitutes a major topic for research.Based on this thesis, deeper insights respectively to Austrian family businesses and their succession process should be given.
To collect empirical data, the used method of this paper are qualitative interviews in form of guiding interviews. For this empirical study, qualitative interviews are the best way to generate the necessary results. The possibility is given to get to know something about the intra-family factors and therefore the emotional aspects of family business succession. Within the empirical research overall six interviews have been carried out. Five of them where accomplished among successors and predecessors. One was an interview with an expert to get deeper insights in legal and tax issues.
The research findings revealed that there is a crucial gap between theory and the enforced qualitative study. With reference to the planning and organization of the succession process there are respective differences. Though this is reasonable because of the narrow research sample. To get more generalizable results the possibility is given to accomplish a quantitative research on the basis of this one.