The combination of management control practices

Abstract

The combination of management control (MC) practices has become a topic of great and enduring interest and concern in management accounting literature. Traditional contingency-based MC research has been criticized about over-emphasizing the benefit from MC practices fitting with organizational context and thus ignoring the benefit from internal consistency among MC practices. Building on this, more and more scholars recognized that the functions and characteristics of individual MC practices may be linked to other MC practices, rather than being only impacted from organizational contexts. Thus, MC researchers are now paying more attention to the combination of MC practices. As the development of MC combination research, a system vs package debate emerges for illustrating MC combination. To address the debate, different views about the debate arose, such as ‘irreconcilable dualism’, ‘unseparated and reconcilable two concepts’ and ‘goes beyond the duality’. However, the emergence of these various views to some extent reflects that MC combination is not thoroughly studied and needs to be further explored, such as what, why and how MC practices are linked to each other. To extent our understanding of MC combination, the thesis was designed to explore the nature and characteristics of the construct and examining it in operation at organizational level. To achieve the objective, three independent and related papers are conducted. The first paper synthesized MC combination literature to elaborate the overview of MC combination by a systematic literature review. We identified two MC combination research streams and discuss how MC combination is studied in both streams. Some research gaps and future research directions are highlighted. The second and third paper, by conducting case studies, empirically explore how MC combination is operated under institutional environment to address organizational objectives. Both papers illustrate the complexity and dynamic of MC combination, respectively. Thus, the thesis, on the one hand, contributes to enrich the understanding of MC combination and theorizing MC combination. On the other hand, the thesis provides practical implications by contributing to researchers for future research and practitioners like organizational managers for considering the design of MC practices.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Yaobo Wang: orcid.org/0009-0002-4339-6423

ORCID for Pingli Li: orcid.org/0000-0001-5020-9126

ORCID for Yu (Jack) Gong: orcid.org/0000-0002-5411-376X

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