A review and discussion of management control in inter-firm relationships: Achievements and future directions

Ariela Caglio and Angelo Ditillo

Accounting, Organizations and Society, 2008, vol. 33, issue 7-8, 865-898

Abstract: Several years have passed since Hopwood (Hopwood, A. G. (1996). Looking across rather than up and down: on the need to explore the lateral processing of information. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 21, 589-590) proclaimed the need to explore the lateral processing of information, transcending legal organizational boundaries. Since then, many contributions in the management accounting literature have been published in an effort to overcoming this shortage. The aim of this work is to investigate whether these contributions have brought the possibilities of that powerful intuition to its full potential development. To this end, the paper provides a review of the theoretical and empirical literature on management control in inter-firm contexts by organizing contributions according to the breadth of the control solutions they investigated, i.e., control archetypes, management control mechanisms, and cost and accounting controls. Our objective is not only to present the state of the art in this field, but also to evaluate critically the corresponding achievements and to assist in developing new research questions. To address the limitations of the extant literature, we propose the prominence of control problems (cooperation, coordination, appropriation concerns) as a way to integrate the different streams of research, and we highlight some important variables (structure of interests, component and cognitional complexity of tasks) that have been neglected so far by management accounting contributors but, as has been suggested in the organizational literature, may influence control choices. We also identify several areas ripe for future research.

Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (54)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361-3682(08)00066-4
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:aosoci:v:33:y:2008:i:7-8:p:865-898

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting, Organizations and Society is currently edited by Christopher Chapman

More articles in Accounting, Organizations and Society from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().