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Firms in the early stage of their organisational lifecycle (ESFs) are subject to concerns founded on a requirement for strategic flexibility, prompting engagement in inter-organisational relationships such as outsourcing. However, studies of the management control dynamics of these relationships are rare. This paper aims to respond by empirically examining the influence of ESF managers on the ongoing management control of such relationships.

A single outsourcing case study is utilised to provide evidence in examining a multi-theoretical framework that adopts a complex adaptive system (CAS) perspective as a qualitative analytical framework, along with the existing accounting theory on control adoption.

Focused on management concerns with tensions between inter-organisational control and strategic flexibility, this paper identifies reasons for the adoption of management controls by an ESF. The inter-organisational system explored in this paper emphasises the importance of adopting a holistic epistemology in understanding changes in control adoption.

This paper extends current theoretical perspectives on control adoption to consider the inter-organisational control concerns of ESF managers.

The insights identified in this paper provide a systemic framework to identify potential organisational and environmental influences on control problems, emphasising environmental co-evolution rather than achievement of ideal equilibrium states.

The intended contribution is to extend the management control literature to consider the effect of organisational lifecycle on the adoption of new inter-organisational management controls in the wake of ongoing trade-off between competing inter-organisational requirements.

This paper aims to explore controls within an inter-organisational relationship involving outsourced management accounting services from the contractor’s perspective.

Qualitative data from within the relationship are analysed in a legitimacy-theory framework, illustrating how controls within the relationship are intended to build the contractor’s legitimacy and what kinds of implications the controls have in relation to conflicts between interests inherent in the relationship.

The legitimacy perspective clarifies that while controls are aimed at ensuring efficiency for the client, they may also provide symbolic displays of the appropriateness of the contractor’s actions both at an inter-organisational level for the client and at an individual level for the contractor’s employees. While the contractor intends to build legitimacy with the client by demonstrating utility in the form of efficiency, the process also gives the client influence and allows the disposition in terms of shared values to be demonstrated. However, this process has some negative consequences for the contractor’s employees as it is insufficient for serving the boundary-spanning employees’ interests connected with the nature of their work. Hence, the same controls need to yield benefits and fair outcomes for employees. The controls simultaneously foster interconnections that contribute to permanence and formalise the outsourcing of complex services, thereby rendering such processes comprehensible and transferable to other settings, which can be seen to serve the contractor’s continuity interests.

The paper contributes to academic research by illustrating how controls within inter-organisational relationships not only steer boundary-spanners’ work to conform to a client’s needs but may also help to build legitimacy via symbolic properties in the presence of conflicting interests at both an inter-organisational and individual level. It specifically highlights the important role of boundary-spanners lower in the organisational structure, who both affect and are influenced by the intentions to build legitimacy with the client.

The literature on managing inter‐organisational relationships typically suggests managing these relationships based on the formalised exchange of information across the organisational boundary with due respect to trust build‐up through successive interactions. The purpose of this paper is to argue that a focus on trust reduces the flexibility and accessibility of resources and hence ruins the advantages of inter‐organisational relationships. The paper focuses on power as a means for absorbing uncertainty when managing inter‐organisational relationships.

The paper is based on findings from a case study of inter‐organisational relationships. Governmentality is used as a framework for analysing the practise of managing inter‐organisational relationships.

A number of representations are employed along the boundary between the case study parties and thereby the boundary is emphasised. These representations are used to set the discourse for negotiating the terms of the cooperation. During negotiations a common understanding of cooperation is constructed and thereby fine‐grained information is assembled. In this specific case, the contract plays a central role as a representation of the project in focus. In the construction of the price for the product, open book and benchmark data are used. Information does not cross‐organisational boundaries at face value. Information is applied to the representations and brought into play during negotiations. Thereby managing and management accounting become significant components of the boundary between the parties.

The paper shows that power, as a means for absorbing uncertainty in inter‐organisational relationships, can solve the dilemmas regarding flexibility and access to resources that trust can cause.

The purpose of this paper is to review the Nordic research on accounting in inter-organizational relationships (IORs) and relates the Nordic contributions to the international literature. Additionally, it examines alternative approaches to the understanding of accounting in IORs and proposes some directions for future research.

Thirty-one papers were identified and assessed in terms of their topic, inter-organizational setting, theoretical approach, research methods and results. This study followed a six-step process from formulating objectives, through establishing inclusion and exclusion criteria, to paper selection and mutual assessments.

The Nordic literature presents a distinct approach to the understanding of accounting in IORs. The Nordic studies are characterized by theoretical pluralism, in-depth case studies and an interest towards micro-processes in a variety of inter-organizational settings and from the point of view of multiple parties.

The authors propose two specific areas of research: the interconnections between accounting measures, monetary flows and value creation as well as the role of accounting in creating stability and instability in IORs. These areas of research emphasize a stronger engagement with the core issues of managing appropriation and cooperation concerns and provide an outlook for novel insights into classical issues and increased integration within the field.

This paper seeks to examine the inter‐organisational processes used to control international master franchise agreements from operational, relational and evolutionary perspectives.

The research is undertaken through a qualitative, in‐depth case study in the international hotel industry. The case comprises an international master franchise agreement between a large US‐based hotel franchisor and its European master franchisee.

The study identifies the inter‐related nature of operational and relational control processes and how these evolve over the life of a master franchise agreement. It reveals how the perceptions of franchise members serve to enhance or inhibit the development of relational norms and how these, in turn, impact on the predominant type of control and the specific inter‐organisational processes employed.

The research is based on a single in‐depth case study within one industrial context and the universality of the findings may therefore be limited.

The paper offers insights to managers of international master franchise agreements on the interaction between members' perceptions, relational norms developed and the inter‐organisational processes used to control the agreement. It also reveals how the use of contractual controls can inhibit the development of relational norms and negatively impact on relationships between franchisors and master franchisees. The findings presented may have relevance to managers of other types of international alliance agreements.

By drawing on both the alliance and franchise literature and employing a qualitative approach, the study helps to close a gap in the current international franchise literature through the identification of specific inter‐organisational processes for control within international master franchise agreements, how these evolve in respect of relational norms and how these are underpinned by perceptions of franchisor and franchisee members.

The role of management control is frequently emphasized in connection with inter-organizational relationships and value networks. For example, boundary-spanning cost and accounting control techniques have been studied in multifaceted empirical settings. The prevalence of such techniques is, however, currently unknown in conjunction with companies’ interests to increase inter-organizational integration in general. Additionally, also the nexus between the internal state of cost management and the company’s willingness to develop inter-organizational relationships requires further investigation. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The study is based on an extensive survey that was responded to by more than 1,500 CEOs and CFOs from large, medium-sized and small Finnish enterprises in a variety of industries. As the authors chose the mixed-methods approach, both quantitative and qualitative data were collected for the study.

The findings suggest that companies can be allocated to five clusters: “the cost experts,” “the trustful,” “the holdouts,” “the trailblazers” and “the uncertain”. When the networking-oriented clusters, “the trustful” and “the trailblazers” are combined, the authors can conclude that 40 percent of the studied companies are interested in increasing inter-organizational integration. However, only 7 percent have boundary-spanning techniques in use. There is also a correlation between interest in integrating and developing cost management.

This paper contains several theoretical implications, although further research, e.g. comparative studies, is required to verify the findings. The scarcity of managerial implications can be regarded as a limitation.

This paper fills several untapped research gaps by studying inter-organizational integration in the cost management context from multiple, complementary perspectives with a particularly large set of data.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how accounting and supply function specialists shape controls in collaborative supply networks (CSNs) and how both might co‐evolve.

This paper is a case study of an Australian metal manufacturer (“SteelBiz”) and its CSN is conducted.

The paper finds changes in both trust vis‐à‐vis formal controls and in intra‐organisational supply‐accounting relations occurred in a mutually constitutive manner. At SteelBiz, a shift to formal controls occurred due to the efforts of the accounting function in contesting organisational visibility. Overall, both intra‐ and inter‐organisational relations were found to co‐evolve.

The limitations of the paper include: an empirical examination of buyer organisations only; a focus on intra‐organisational issues between functional specialists to the relative exclusion of both more “macro” trends and inter‐personal relationships; and the limited generalisability associated with the methodology chosen. Future research should consider both buyer and supplier organisations and whether the “disciplinary alignments” observed here are reflective of more enduring patterns.

The contributions of this paper are two‐fold. First, the paper attempts to fill a gap in the literature pertaining to how intra‐organisational relations might influence network controls. Furthermore, the few studies that do exist describe the “intra‐inter” dynamic as uni‐directional only, whereas this paper reveals how both mutually constitute the other. Second, complexities into the trust‐formal control relationship are revealed while it is proposed that as CSN relations develop, process‐based mechanisms become more important than other relationship‐sustaining devices, with the trust‐formal control dynamic dependent on ongoing negotiation and information as mobilised by intra‐organisational participants.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to debates about the relationship between trust and control in the governance of inter-organisational relationships. In particular, the authors focus on the question of how the relationship between trust and control shifts over time.

An in-depth case study was conducted in a company operating in the aerospace industry. The authors aim to understand this company’s practices and, at the same time, to use the case study to deepen the knowledge of the complex trust/control nexus. The authors follow the changes in the relationship between trust and control as the company restructured its supply chain, and discuss issues which it had to address in the later phases of the supply chain restructuring.

The paper illustrates the duality of the trust/control nexus. The authors show how the studied company coped with the complex relationships with its suppliers as collaboration increased. The authors identify particular control mechanisms that the company developed to manage such complexity, such as a supplier strategy and a relationship profile tool.

The paper studies supply chain restructuring and the changing relationship of trust and control over time only from the perspective of the assembler/manufacturer which “owns”/manages the supply chain.

The authors observe a move from inter-personal trust to inter-organisational trust. Furthermore, the authors illustrate how managers can intervene to maintain and stabilise trust and ensure that trust and control do not degrade or escalate beyond desirable levels.

This paper aims to discuss the need for management control system for information security management that encapsulates the technical, formal and informal systems. This motivated the conceptualization of supply chain information security from a management controls perspective. Extant literature on information security mostly focused on technical security and managerial nuances in implementing and enforcing technical security through formal policies and quality standards at an organizational level. However, most of the security mechanisms are difficult to differentiate between businesses, and there is no one common platform to resolve the security issues pertaining to varied organizations in the supply chain.

The paper was conceptualized based on the review of literature pertaining to information security domain.

This study analyzed the need and importance of having a higher level of control above the already existing levels so as to cover the inter-organizational context. Also, it is suggested to have a management controls perspective for an all-encompassing coverage to the information security discipline in organizations that are in the global supply chain.

This paper have conceptualized the organizational and inter-organizational challenges that need to be addressed in the context of information security management. It would be difficult to contain the issues of information security management with the existing three levels of controls; hence, having a higher level of security control, namely, the management control that can act as an umbrella to the existing domains of security controls was suggested.

The purpose of this study is to examine how the management accounting practice in an organisational unit affects the ability to conduct inter‐organisational control.

Governmentality is used as the main theoretical basis for the interpretation of empirical data. A qualitative case study is used to gather information from an electronics company.

The company enters its inter‐organisational relationships with the ambition of being in power in the relationship. To begin with, management accounting plays a central role in the negotiation process. Due to inadequate management accounting practices, the company is unable to include cost information in their response to proposals made by their suppliers during negotiations. Consequently, the cost aspect of the product fades away from negotiations as they progress.

The study concludes that an important part of management accounting practice is to reveal the intra‐organisational cost consequences of proposals made by suppliers during negotiation processes. These cost consequences are central during negotiation processes since they will keep the focus on costs and cost improvements during the negotiation process. The study indicates that accounting technologies and the physical presence of the management accountant are not sufficient to keep costs on the agenda. Constant cost consciousness requires that the management accountant actively takes part in the joint problem solving process.