Ramar och kramar : Verksamhetsstyrning vid olika kombinationer av regulatorisk belastning och differentiering

Sammanfattning

How management control is designed and experienced does not follow from regulatory burden or differentiation in isolation, but from their combination. This study examines how management control is designed and experienced in organizations with different combinations of these two axes. Previous research has largely treated them separately, while knowledge of how the control boundaries, monitoring practices, and discretion within management control are designed and experienced when the axes are combined remains limited. The study is based on a qualitative comparative case study of four organizations, each representing a combination of high and low regulatory burden and differentiation, with interviews of one person who designs the management control and one who experiences it in each case. The findings show that control design largely follows the direction of each axis at the level of individual control elements, and that organizations sharing a high classification on one axis display similar patterns in the control elements driven by that axis, regardless of the other. When the two axes pull in different directions, the tension in management control is resolved through a dimension-specific division of labour, in which the dominant axis in 2 each control element determines its character. The study further shows that the nature of the organization can explain the control beyond what the combination predicts, and identifies a mechanism for variability in how coercive control is experienced: when regulatory requirements are closely tied to the organization's competitive advantage, this connection generates an internal transparency that makes coercive control experienced as meaningful rather than constraining. The study contributes a theoretically grounded and empirically anchored matrix that enables practitioners to position their organization, identify the directions the axes point management control towards, and reflect on whether the design is adapted to those conditions.