Philippe Zarlowski

Management Control Research and the Management of Uncertainty: Rethinking Knowledge in Management

The role of managers in organizations has long been construed as that of decision-making under conditions of limited rationality and uncertainty (Simon & March, 1958; Cyert & March, 1963). For instance, decision- makers can only access a limited set of alternative solutions to the problem at hand, or might discover their preferences between competing alternatives through the decision-making process itself. The uncertainty about both the future conditions of the environment and the possible outcomes of ambiguous decisions would reinforce the consequences of limited rationality. In an organizational context of uncertainty and ambiguity, management control researchers have underlined how management control systems might play an enabling role for managers through enhanced monitoring and learning about organizational performance (Burchell et al., 1980; Ferreira & Otley, 2009). The divide between practice and research, or the lack of relevance of research for practice, has been documented and commented on by several prominent researchers in our field of management control (see for instance, Baldvinsdottir et al., 2010; Hopwood 2007, 2008, 2009; Otley, 2001; Scapens, 2008; van Helden & Northcott, 2010) or in the field of management studies (e.g. Miller et al., 2009; Van de Ven & Johnson, 2006). However, little has been said about how management control research might facilitate the management of uncertainty in organizational contexts and enhance the enabling properties of management control systems.

Amendments to Reporting of QI Interventions: Insights from the Concept of Affordances

Quality Improvement (QI) interventions are used extensively to solve problems associated with the quality, effectiveness and efficiency of healthcare. However, outcome assessments show strong variations in the success of a given QI initiative across organizational settings. Therefore, a growing body of research focuses on the interplay between interventions and their context of implementation. This chapter builds on the healthcare and organization literature to illustrate, through the concept of affordances, the complex dynamics that accompany the introduction of technological innovations in organizational settings. Insights to complement existing healthcare models for the systematic analysis of QI interventions, such as MUSIQ and SQUIRE, are proposed. In particular, greater attention to the implications of intervention design for the enabling and constraining properties of QI technologies is suggested in order to improve the reporting of QI implementation.