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Current research relates multiple control practices as packages, systems, or accumulations. This relationship signifies that management control practices exist as multiplicities and interact in various ways. These interactions strengthen management control practices. However, this generalisation misses the when of relations, which is a problem, as management control practices are not always related, for example, because they often have their own domain attached to an organisational entity’s tasks. This paper reports on a study of a firm’s (Automaker) management control of its supply chain. This was organised as two types of concern – risk and performance management – that were delegated to two organisational entities each having its associated management control practices. This organisation was a delegation of responsibilities, decision rights and control practices. The study draws on Michel Callon’s distinction between framing and overflow to analyse the framing activity involved in upholding this separation and the overflows stemming from the difficulties of upholding strong framings. In effect, the paper discusses when risk and performance management practices are related, un-related and re-related and concludes that the when helps explain how the relation works to rearrange the importance of the framings and via overflows to introduce completely new framing devices.

This paper analyses path dependence and path creation in firm innovation focusing on the effect of cognitive frames and organisational processes. A Northern European medical device firm is analysed through a detailed assessment of the structural and processual elements of cognitive path dependence. Cognitive schemas are analysed through development of ideal typical views on innovation and through an investigation of two specific innovation projects. Drawing on sensemaking and actor network theory the paper adds to the literature in three respects. First, it provides a more systematic analysis than available in the existing literature of how cognitive frames enable and constrain firm innovation. Second, it presents an empirical analysis that contributes to a differentiation of the concept of path dependence, distinguishing between innovative path dependence and technological path dependence. Third, the paper analyses the timing of constraints and path dependence. In the cases studied the innovation approach frames the innovation problem and constraints in relation to technologies have an impact on the innovation processes later, after new technologies have been thoroughly researched. The paper illustrates how the case firm is cognitively locked into an innovation path focused on generating ever-new product versions on different technological platforms, regardless of cannibalisation among the firm's different product versions. Despite the cognitive lock-in to an innovation path the firm is unconstrained in its choice of technological platforms and paths. Firms’ innovation processes may thus simultaneously be characterised by unrestrained search processes and myopic behaviour.

This paper discusses and reconceptualises the role and practice of accounting in dynamic and complex business networks. The paper conceptualises change in complex inter-organisational systems as a process where various perturbations from the environment or installation of management accounting affect the system. This initiates two types of development. Firstly, the system searches the inter-organisational space, and branches out into new inter-organisational configurations—the system bifurcates. Secondly, the systems studied in this paper did not stabilise to the new order and inter-organisational configuration—rather they oscillated between institutional orders. The inter-organisational system is therefore schizophrenic in a sense, since it can shift between fundamentally different behaviours and orders within a short span of time. Management accounting in this complex evolving inter-organisational system is a source of instability rather than stability, a source of emergent, unintended order rather than planned or institutionalised change.

This article analyses the relationship between management control and boundaries of firms and supply chains. We suggest that an inter-disciplinary and pluralistic approach to boundary setting, which investigates boundaries in an interpretive, functionalist and constructionist perspective is capable of capturing important aspects of the complex processes that construct, deconstruct and reconstruct firms and supply chains. Specifically, the article demonstrates the dynamics of boundary setting and relationship development through the study of a large hearing aid manufacturer and its relationships with suppliers and customers. We show how inter-organizational controls and boundaries gradually emerged in response to local interactions, learning and inter-dependencies between entities in the field. Accounting served both to integrate entities, which were internal and external to the focal firm as well as to fragment the focal firm. The article thus demonstrates the dynamics of integration and fragmentation within a supply chain and shows how firms and supply chains have multiple and sometimes contradictory definitions of identity and scope.