Anne-Marie Kruis

Management Control Research: A Review of Current Developments

In this chapter, we provide an overview of current developments in management control research, looking both at method choices and thematic patterns. Traditionally, overview papers are based on what has been published over a specific period of time in a selection of leading journals. Our approach is slightly different. Rather than looking at what has been published, we want to see what people are currently working on, and to pick up on themes and trends that appear to define the contemporary research agenda of the field. As a point of departure, we choose the papers from the 2013 conference of the Management Control Association (MCA), held at Nyenrode Business University. The MCA conference has established itself as one of the main venues for management control researchers, and is known for its open-minded- ness regarding methodological positions and method choices. To get a richer perspective on the contemporary research agenda, we add a selection of papers that have been published in the period 2008–2012 and that appear to have a strong impact on ongoing research work. To identify these papers, we rely on Google Scholar for citation scores.1 The interesting thing about these scores is that they are not restricted to references in selected scholarly journals (as for instance Tompson’s ISI Web of Knowledge scores), but encompass all sources available on the internet — including unpublished working papers, conference proceedings and seminar presentations.

Management control of support services : Organizational embeddedness and non-strategic IT

This chapter provides evidence on the factors that influence the design of the control arrangements that govern support services. Specifically, we study sourcing decisions of non-strategic information technology (IT) support services. While the popular management literature suggests to outsource non-strategic activities, in practice organizations perform these services (partly) in-house. Based on transaction cost economics (TCE), we hypothesize that control structure choices depend on asset specificity, uncertainty and frequency. Using survey data on IT sourcing decisions from 89 firms in the construction industry, we find support for most of our hypotheses. Our results indicate that asset specificity deriving from the degree of organizational embeddedness of the IT function negatively affects firms’ propensity to outsource their non-core IT support, and that (behavioural) uncertainty intensifies this negative effect. As expected, we also find that frequency has a negative direct effect on the willingness to outsource IT services provision. However, we find no support for the hypothesized interaction between asset specificity and frequency. Overall, our study indicates that the organizations choice to outsource non-strategic support services depends on the organizational role of these services, rather than on their technological characteristics.