Abstract
In this chapter by Alf Westelius and Johnny Lind, “Painting the relevant organisation”, the authors discuss how it is increasingly less self-evident which entity should be the focus of strategic management control. Although the relevant organisation may be the whole, or some parts, of an organisation, it may also be a somewhat broader entity such as a joint venture, an imaginary (i.e. virtual) organisation, a network (Uppsala School network theory style), a value constellation or a partnership. The chapter discusses all these, less obvious, possibilities. Because different people are likely to have different views on what constitutes the relevant entity, an essential aspect of strategic management control is establishing and maintaining the dialogue on associations and boundaries. The dialogue may involve a strong party, perhaps aiming to inspect and influence external parties (e.g. suppliers and customers), but can also be conducted among more equal partners. The authors conclude that people who want to take an active management role, or who want to include others in the exercise of management control, should learn how to paint a convincing picture of what they view as the relevant entity to control (or the relevant parties that should cooperate in jointly controlling their collaboration).
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Notes
- 1.
This unquestioning approach to systemic limitations does not apply exclusively to traditional management control. Other chapters in this book (on the topics of strategy maps, planning, costing and pricing, co-worker control and the controller’s follow-up role) also take this approach.
- 2.
The Uppsala School’s network theory originated in a large European comparative study (set in France, Italy, Sweden, Germany and Great Britain) that examined relationships among purchasers and suppliers in industrial markets (Håkansson 1982). This study revealed that such markets are characterised by the interactions between mutually dependent companies.
- 3.
Following James Moore’s (1993) article on the ecology of competition in the Harvard Business Review, ecology and ecosystems have gained ground in the strategy and management control literature and among practitioners. Whereas Moore and, for example, Iansiti and Levien (2004) are fascinated by situations in which dominant actors sooner or later appear and exert powerful influence, Olve et al. (2013) use business ecology to point to the unpredictable and uncontrollable aspects of cooperation development.
- 4.
The possibility of influencing people’s understanding is also a key aspect of the strategy map discussion in Chap. 2, and the calibration and adjustments of various subjective understandings through dialogue, often related to numbers in reports or targets, is a recurrent theme in other chapters of this book.
- 5.
Around this time, the interest for such boundary-spanning collaboration and dialogues was starting to grow also within management control research. The influential management accounting researcher Anthony Hopwood published a call in 1996 in Accounting, Organizations and Society for research on information exchange and control in organisational networks and in cooperations that cross organisational boundaries (Hopwood 1996).
- 6.
The idea that actors at many levels of the organisation participate in strategic management control is emphasised repeatedly in this book, although most authors do not claim they are supporters of the network school.
- 7.
By agile, we mean manoeuvrable and adaptable.
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Westelius, A., Lind, J. (2020). Painting the Relevant Organisation. In: Nilsson, F., Petri, CJ., Westelius, A. (eds) Strategic Management Control. Management for Professionals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38640-5_3
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