Business as usual? An institutional view of the relationship between management control systems and strategy

The relationship between management control systems (MCS) and strategy has received considerable attention in the management control literature. Contingency-based approaches, however, have traditionally dominated this research, with limited attention devoted specifically to how MCS and strategy may combine in organisations operating within highly institutionalised environments. Adopting an institutional perspective, the current study is based on interviews with CEOs and senior executives in 32 Australian Not-for-Profit organisations. Our findings indicate a tendency for these organisations to decouple informal control from MCS, producing a ‘business as usual’ mentality via the pervasive informal approach to control, supplanting contingency-based predictions relating to MCS-strategy relations