Accounting and Organizational Management

Management control systems are the formal and informal mechanisms organizations use to set goals, monitor progress, and align individual behavior with broader strategy — encompassing everything from budgets and performance dashboards to the balanced scorecard, which links financial results to operational, customer, and learning measures. Researchers in this area study how these systems are designed, how they change over time, and what consequences they produce, paying particular attention to the organizational contexts that shape whether a given approach actually improves performance or merely adds bureaucratic weight. A persistent open question is how control systems should function across organizational boundaries — in supply chains, joint ventures, and other inter-organizational arrangements where authority is shared and accounting data must serve multiple parties with potentially divergent interests. Current work is also probing the causal relationship between measurement choices and outcomes, trying to distinguish systems that genuinely drive strategic success from those that create the appearance of accountability without the substance.

Works

85,159

Total citations

925,358

Keywords

Management Control SystemsPerformance MeasurementStrategic ManagementBalanced ScorecardOrganizational ContextAccounting Change