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Tremendous change has taken place in organisational structures, networks and strategy over the past 25 years. Yet, a strategic management framework developed 25 years ago has increased in popularity among researchers in the past decade. This paper aims to review how Simons’ Levers of Control (LOC) framework has been used in empirical research studies over the past 25 years.

The findings are based on electronic database searches of papers adopting Simons’ framework published in accounting and management journals.

A total of 45 empirical studies adopting the LOC framework are presented chronologically by research method. The review highlights the far greater use of the framework in qualitative compared to quantitative studies. Qualitative studies have extended the application of the framework to broader organisational issues such as sustainability, environmental accounting and inter-organisational controls. The quantitative studies have mainly sought to add to our understanding of the antecedents and outcomes of the use of interactive control systems.

This paper furthers our understanding of Simons’ framework by synthesising and analysing the literature over 25 years. It provides insight into the varying interpretations of the concepts underlying the framework in empirical studies including differences in operationalisation of the concepts in quantitative studies. In addition, it highlights the application of the framework beyond the original domain in which it was developed. Fruitful areas for future research are pointed to in the paper.

Client engagement increases substantially when staff teams implement active support. The impact of active support on challenging behaviour is less clear. There are grounds for believing that active support procedures could in some cases neutralise environmental conditions known to evoke challenging behaviour. We implemented a three‐phase clinical intervention to increase engagement and reduce passive and challenging behaviour. In phase 1 we trained staff to deliver inviting activity‐based instruction at eye level. In phase 2 we introduced activity support plans to increase client choice and control. In phase 3 staff used peer‐monitoring procedures to consolidate implementation. We measured staff behaviour and client outcome across the three phases of intervention and at follow‐up. Staff provided warm and inviting activity‐based instruction at eye level more frequently after participating in phase 1 on‐site training. The proportion of activity‐based interactions with choice increased when activity plans were introduced in phase 2. Engagement replaced passive and challenging behaviour. Staff observations suggested changes were maintained over the short run. Our own observations indicated decay at 22 months. Our data suggest that active support procedures can make challenging behaviour less likely by altering antecedent conditions that reliably evoke such behaviour. Without sustained effort, interventions are susceptible to decay.

Research has demonstrated that public organizations commonly adopt performance measurement systems to assess the operational accountability of service delivery. This same research, however, has revealed that public managers struggle with using performance measures for improving service performance and for determining long-term budget needs. One plausible explanation for the limited use of performance statistics is found in the strategic management literature on the evolutionary theory of routine. It suggests that private firms make decisions by identifying alternatives to base routines for process innovation rather than relying on the traditional theory of profit maximization. By applying the routines-based perspective to public organizations, this article presents a model of results-based management where performance of service delivery represents our proxy for profit and where performance measures serve primarily to monitor the performance of selected service dimensions. The results of output, outcome, and efficiency measures are then used to support performance, financial, and strategic management, including the selection and implementation of strategies to alter the base routines of service delivery. These new routines, created under the boundaries of rational choice, often have substantial budgetary implications over time when they change the calculus between resource consumption and service provision.

The traditional role of computer‐based information systems is to provide support for individual decision making. According to this model, information is to be seen as a valuable resource for the decision maker faced with a complex task. Such a view of information systems in organizations does however fail to include such phenomena as the daily use of information for misrepresen‐tation purposes. The conventional systems analysis methods, whether they are data‐ or decision‐oriented, do not help in understanding the nature of organizations and their ways of processing information. This paper proposes what appears to be a more realistic approach to the analysis and design of information systems. Organizations are seen as networks of contracts which govern exchange transactions between members having only partially overlapping goals. Conflict of interests is explicitly admitted to be a factor affecting information and exchange costs. Information technology is seen as a means to streamline exchange transactions, thus enabling economic organizations to operate more efficiently. Examples are given of MIS, data base and office automation systems, where both the organization and its information system were jointly designed. These examples illustrate the power of the approach, which is based on recent research in the new institutional economics.

Considers why being able to find new roles for employees within the organization is of growing importance.

Explains the need for organizations to identify what skills they will need in future and understand the individual strengths of the people they already employ. Argues that “growing your own timber” is a more effective proposition than buying in new resource.

Emphasizes the need to deal constructively with blockers – employees in key positions who the organization feels are not now optimal for that role.

Highlights the need for individual workers to understand that their personal and professional growth is a prerequisite for their ongoing professional capability.

Looks at the impact on individual employees, and on organizations, of the social change towards greater flexibility in the workforce.

Argues that organizational development, talent management, learning development and people engagement will be key to the strategies for enabling organizations to find new roles for existing staff.

The purpose of the paper is to critically question conventional views of the one‐dimensional, mechanistic and negative image of human nature of Scientific Management. Both for worker behavior and for managerial behavior positive aspects of an image of human nature are reconstructed in organizational economic terms.

Through institutional economic reconstruction, drawing on the methods and concepts of organizational and institutional economics, the portrayal of workers and managers by Scientific Management is critically assessed.

It is suggested that a conceptual asymmetry exists in Taylor's writings regarding the portrayal of human nature of workers and managers. Whereas for workers a model of self‐interest was applied (through the concepts of “systematic soldering” and “natural soldiering”), Taylor portrayed managers through a positive, behavioral model of human nature that depicted the manager as “heartily cooperative”. The key thesis is that by modeling managers through a rather positive image of human nature Taylor could no longer methodically apply the model of economic man in order to test out and prevent interaction conflict between potentially self‐interested managers and workers.

The paper focused on Scientific Management to advance the thesis that the portrayal of human nature has been ill approached by management and organization theorists who were apparently pioneering an institutional and organizational economics. Future research has to broaden the scope of research to other pioneers in management and organization research, but also to critics in behavioral sciences, such as organization psychology, who may misunderstand how economics approaches the portrayal of human nature, in particular regarding self‐interest.

Taylor's portrayal of managers as naturally good persons, who were not self‐interested, caused implementation conflict and implementation problems for Scientific Management and led to his summoning by the US Congress. By modeling managers as heartily cooperative, Taylor could no longer analyze potentially self‐interested behavior, even opportunistic behavior of managers in their interactions with workers. Scientific Management had thus no remedy to handle “soldiering” of managers. This insight, that managerialism needs to be accounted for in a management theory, has manifold practical implications for management consultancy, management education, and for the practice of management in general. Students and practitioners have to be informed about the necessary and useful role a model of self‐interest (economic man) methodically plays in economic management theory.

The paper reconstructs the portrayal of human nature in early management theory, which seemingly anticipated the advances – and certain pitfalls – of modern institutional economics. The paper unearths, from an economic perspective, conceptual misunderstandings of Taylor regarding his image of human nature of workers and managers.

Given managerial choices and the sociocultural context in which they are made are at the heart of management history, then an understanding of both is critical. This paper argues that the “late” North (2005) provides such an understanding.

This study is a research review synthesizing much disparate but cognate literature across the new institutionalism in organizational sociology/studies and in economics.

“Late” North (2005) provides an important ontological frame for dealing with the so-called “paradox of embedded agency”, an approach that may afford management historians a more thorough account of how institutions are formed and change over time. North has always maintained that institutional change is the outcome of deliberate or intentional choices made by actors. However, and unlike his earlier work which ignores how humans come to make the said choices, North (2005) explicates the sociocognitive process by which intentionality emerges with expanded consciousness, as humans construct ideas and beliefs about reality, beliefs that shape decisions to alter the said reality via the process of institutional change.

It is rather curious that despite North’s status as a “historian”, management historians – or at least those publishing in this journal from its founding in 1995 – do not seem to be terribly interested in North’s work. Although North rates a mention in rival journals, other than Dagnino and Quattrone’s (2006) study, papers in this journal invoking institutional theory align with the new institutionalism in organizational sociology/studies (NIOS) rather than North’s new institutional economics (NIE). Even in the related sub-discipline of business history, those professing an interest in institutions are more interested in the NIE of non-historians Coase and Oliver Williamson than they are in North’s NIE. And, in recent work analysing the place and significance of institutional theory in historical research, the foundations are unmistakeably NIOS rather than North’s NIE.

The purpose of this paper is to delineate the substantially different theory and application of corporate governance idea in Islamic financial theory contrary to the perceived one in the literature. Thus, a comparative and contrasting examination of the topic is provided.

A theoretical and extensively comparative study of the literature to bring out the objective of presenting the systemic theory of Islamic corporate governance underlying its specific epistemological foundations.

The hetrodox theory of Islamic finance in regards to the theme of corporate governance is shown to be a viable alternative way of understanding this topic in the light of the particular Islamic epistemological premise. Thus, Islamic financial perspective, exemplified here in terms of corporate governance, is expounded.

Empirical extension can be made but such epistemological responses are presently not available from the Islamic financial institutions because of their imperfect premise on the epistemology of unity of knowledge and organization on which the theory of Islamic corporate governance rests.

A vast social implication of corporate govarnance is opened by its epistemological inquiry comprehending integrated decision‐making and systemic complemenatrities expending across society at large. Thereby, a socio‐financial theory of corporate governance in the epistemological context is elaborated upon.

This is a pathbreaking paper premised on its epistemological approach of unity of knowledge and learning systems as a distinct contribution in the theory of corporate governance in the field of ethical socio‐financial perspective.

The Republic of Palau in the Micronesian region of the Pacific illuminates the complexities of how the political geography of development is shaped through diplomacy, defense and migration policy. The Compact of Free Association (COFA) between Palau and the US has been a topic of debate and for some resistance.

Through discursive analysis of grey literature and post-development and political geography frameworks, this paper analyzes the way in which development, through unconventional pathways, is used to exert power by Palau’s largest donor, the US.

The donor–recipient, government-to-government framework fails to explore the ways in development is used as power through military operations, zonal capitalism, redefined citizenship and tourism as new aid modalities. These graduated sovereignties in Palau show that political geography is taking shape through new pathways of development, which has resulted in more actors, institutions and discourses.

With limited research on the region of Micronesia and particularly the politics of development, this paper contributes important analysis to the lead up to the COFA renewal negotiations between the US and Palau in 2024.