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This study examines the relationship between business strategy, management control system (MCS) type and performance. Does the alignment of organisation business strategy and MCS fresult in better performance?

This study draws on the business strategy and MCS type literature to identify business strategies and MCS types. A scoring method was used to identify business strategy types and cluster analysis to identify MCS types from a sample of 80 firms and 621 firm-years of data. Analysis of variance was used analyse the differences.

Four types of MCS were identified and were labelled clan, adhocracy, market and hierarchy. The sample was split into defender, analyser, prospector and reactor strategies. The results showed defender strategies performed better with hierarchy or market type MCSs while prospector strategies performed better with clan or adhocracy MCS types. Analysers performed acceptably with all MCS types.

The results of this study suggest that organisations should align their business strategy with a certain MCS type to achieve good performance. Also, alignment of top management and business strategy is supported as the top management properties differ between the MCS types.

This research contributes to the management control and strategy literature by demonstrating how the alignment between organisation business strategy and organisation-level MCS type determines organisational performance. The results suggest that differing business strategies yield better performance when aligned with the appropriate management controls represented by an MCS type.

Management controls are the processes and mechanisms managers use to influence the behaviour of individuals and groups towards the organisation’s objectives and goals. Discrete management controls and management control system (MCS) frameworks have been extensively researched, but there is little research on organisation-level MCS types. This study aims to identify organisation-level MCS types.

This study draws on the MCS type literature, the competing values framework and the upper echelons theory to form organisation effectiveness and top management team constructs to characterise firms. Cluster analysis was used to group a sample of 318 firm-years into MCS types.

This study reports a theory-based measurement construct that is initially validated with new empirical data. The authors found from the empirical data four different categories of firms based on the general type of their MCSs labelled clan, adhocracy, market and hierarchy.

This study makes two contributions to the MCS literature. Firstly, it presents a theory-based measurement construct to identify organisational and top management attributes that can be used to classify organisations’ overall MCS types. Secondly, it demonstrates how information from annual reports and other publicly available data sources can be used to identify the overall MCS types of organisations.

This paper examined the relationship between TMT demographic properties and firm performance using diversity and level variables and measuring differing constructs of firm performance representing divergent strategies.

Structural equation modelling was used to test the relationships between TMT demographic properties and firm performance measured as return on net operating assets (RNOA), and its disaggregates profit margin (PM) and asset turnover (ATO). Data were from 89 Finnish firms during the years 2008–2011, resulting in 320 observations.

TMT team tenure had associations with RNOA through both PM and ATO while TMT age, age diversity, firm tenure, firm tenure diversity and team tenure diversity showed paths through ATO. TMT firm tenure diversity showed effects in opposing directions through PM and ATO.

The results help to understand and apply the separate effects of age, firm tenure and team tenure on TMT and firm performance. These results also provide explanations on how these TMT properties affect firm performance in diverse types of firms pursuing different strategies.

The results suggest that both diversity and level in a measured TMT demographic property are linked with firm performance, and the effect can be in differing directions. These links go through differing paths when using disaggregated operational firm performance measures. Also, diversity in top management is not always beneficial since it can cause separation or conflict impairing performance.

This paper aims to propose a new technique for programming robotized machining tasks based on intuitive human–machine interaction. This will enable operators to create robot programs for small-batch production in a fast and easy way, reducing the required time to accomplish the programming tasks.

This technique makes use of online walk-through path guidance using an external force/torque sensor, and simple and intuitive visual programming, by a demonstration method and symbolic task-level programming.

Thanks to this technique, the operator can easily program robots without learning every robot-specific language and can design new tasks for industrial robots based on manual guidance.

The main contribution of the paper is a new procedure to program machining tasks based on manual guidance (walk-through teaching method) and user-friendly visual programming. Up to now, the acquisition of paths and the task programming were done in separate steps and in separate machines. The authors propose a procedure for using a tablet as the only user interface to acquire paths and to make a program to use this path for machining tasks.

Several scholars have recently highlighted the narrowness of accounting research regarding it as a threat to scholarly developments in the field. The aim of this study was to chart progress in management accounting research using a sample of doctoral dissertations published in Finland. In particular, the study examines the range and diversity of research strategic choices in Finnish dissertations over time, including the topics and methodological and theoretical approaches chosen. The authors also briefly compare findings over time and with other progress studies.

A longitudinal historical investigation was selected. All of the 80 management accounting doctoral dissertations published in Finnish business schools and departments during 1945-2015 were analysed.

The findings reveal that an expansion of doctoral education has led to an increasing diversity of research strategic choices in Finland. Different issues have been of interest at different times; so, it has been possible to cover a wide range of cost, management accounting and other topics and to use different methodological and theoretical approaches over time. Consequently, management accounting has become a rich and multifaceted field of scientific research.

While this analysis is limited to doctoral research in Finland, the results should be relevant in advancing the understanding of the development of management accounting research.

Overall, the findings support the view that there have been, and continue to be, many ways to conduct innovative research in the field of management accounting.

Dissertation research in this field has been extensive and vital enough to educate new generations of academics, guarantee continuity of the subject as an academic discipline and make management accounting a significant academic field of research.

The paper contributes to current research on management accounting change by an analysis of a sample of doctoral dissertations.