Professional knowledge intensive business service: insights on the short-term transfer of management control knowledge and practices

This paper investigates how Management Control (MC) supports the interaction between professional-knowledge intensive business service (P-KIBS) and manufacturing small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Drawing on institutional theory of management change, we explore how the P-KIBS as a change agent promotes the implementation of MC within SMEs in order to monitor and manage the profitability of services delivered by the P-KIBS. To this purpose, a case study approach is adopted in order to investigate how a private equity (PE) firm, acting as a kind of P-KIBS, implements MC within a SME in order to manage and measure its contribution to the shareholder value creation. The PE context is an interesting field to investigate because, due to its nature, PE is offering to the SME a complex bundle of consulting services including, for example, formulating business strategies, evaluating capital expenditures, solving major operational performance problems in order to improve the shareholder value of SMEs. The results emphasize the socio-technical nature of MC practices, focusing on the interface between the institutional context and the technical accounting issues, which provide new insights on the short-term transfer of MC knowledge and practices