Management control theory

This volume of readings is designed to provide an overview of the development of the study of Management Control.

Most of the readings are taken from work published in the last 35 years, although the paper by Giglioni and Bedian (1974), reviewing the period from 1900-1972 provides some roots back to the beginning of the 20th century.

The 35 year window is arbitrary, but it was a period of considerable change in the range and intent of scholars and researchers in this field.

In order to provide a basic foundation, the introductory section A contains the review paper by Giglioni and Bedian.

Their paper demonstrates the subject of management control was developed with management accounting at its centre and was about the patterns of integration to be established and maintained within organizations to assist the attainment of organizational goals.

In section B the theme of efficiency and effectiveness is explored.

These readings are also ones in which consideration of organizational goals is generally taken as given.

When these are assumed, control becomes a goal-directed and integrative mechanism. This pursuit of effectiveness and efficiency and assumption of the existence of unproblematic organizational goals lay at the heart of the definition of management control provided by Robert Anthony (1965), where he claimed that management control was the process by which managers assure that resources are obtained and used effectively in the accomplishment of the organization's objectives.

Section C is concerned with the work of authors who have explored the notion of control as adaptation.

An early example of this was the work of Stafford Beer who, working within the traditions of operations research and cybernetics set out to build a model for the control of organizations that was logically necessary and sufficient.

The readings in section D are concerned with the social structure of control in organizations.

From the development of the human relations movement in management and organizational studies scholars began to give explicit attention to the interplay of people and their work.

In focusing on the organization in its environment, section E links to the idea of contingency theory related to factors such as technology and organizational structure. The focus is more on the organization as a whole than on the individual in the organization.