Management control as a package—The need for international research

This special issue of JoMaC is devoted to various conceptualizations of management control systems, and it is hoped words and concepts in this field would slowly start to reach a state where they do understand each other’s when the authors use them.

Abstract

This special issue of JoMaC is devoted to various conceptualizations of management control systems.Management control systems have been one of the core topics of academic accounting research for decades.Given this relatively long tradition, national differences in managerial practices and somewhat isolated research communities until recent years, it is not surprising that there exist a number of different conceptualizations and interpretations of what control is, what are management control systems, what is a management system and how this is different from management control system, what is the role of a controller, and so on.On the other hand, it is also somewhat surprising that in today's global world these divergent views have not converged to a system of concepts we could all accept and use similarly as a basis of our academic and practical work.Perhaps this latter point just reminds us that there is not a large number of scholars around the globe working on these topics actively at any point in time and our field of research is not mature yet.Given the various philosophical approaches to research evident today, I doubt we never end up with a common and universal agreement.Nevertheless, I am hoping that words and concepts in our field would slowly start to reach a state where we do understand each other's when we use them.A good example of this difficulty of concepts is the term "control package".It seems that attempts to clarify certain issues bring in new conceptual problems easily.To my understanding Otley used the concept "control package" initially to convey an idea that not all control systems are necessarily designed at the same time to work as a coherent whole, or systems existing in any firm at any point in time may not be all well coordinated.If they were, we could talk about system, either management control system or management system, depending on the scope, and its