The Significance and Issue of Adopting Levers of Control as an Analytical Framework of Management Control Systems: Focus on Simons\u27 Studies

This paper reveals the significance and issue of adopting Simons’Levers of Control（LOC）as an analytical framework of Management Control Systems based on reviews of Simons’ and other previous studies. The significance of adopting LOC is to provide an analytical framework in order to understand how a top manager selects and uses formal information systems and promotes organizational members to learn necessary things to adapt environmental change and maintain or change organizational behavior. In addition, the issue of adopting LOC has “a confusion between beliefs and boundaries systems” and “a confusion between diagnostic and interactive control systems”. Especially, the latter suggests researchers should pay attention to three points such as “share of information”, “dual use ofinformation” and “frequency of use” when they interpret findings from case studies