Information technology (IT) is a tool that is increasingly being developed to operate as a control technology that enacts and enforces management controls (MC1) (Granlund, 2011). How IT is designed and configured can have long-term impacts and restrictions on the effectiveness of MC on firms (Grabski et al., 2011). Furthermore, IT utilization appears to be an important deciding factor for IT success as under-utilization, especially in the immediate post-implementation period, often leads to IT failure (Chou et al., 2014). “IT implementations produce complex stories about the consequences of integration, standardization, transparency, and real-timeliness, along-side concerns about complexity in designing, implementing, and using IT-embedded MCS2” (Granlund et al., 2013, p.275–276). Yet, we hold limited knowledge about IT usage in the post-implementation phase (Chou et al., 2014), or the impacts of IT in limiting or facilitating desirable MC (Grabski et al., 2011). Many studies also claim IT, in particular ERP systems, has had little to moderate impact on MC (Berry et al., 2009; Granlund et al., 2013) even though IT has been envisaged to bring substantial effects on and for MC (Dechow and Mouritsen, 2005). For example, IT has the ability to improve communication among organizational units and project teams (Corsi et al., 2017), monitor and scrutinise employee work activities (Liew, 2015), thereby enabling MC and monitoring of objectives including employee performance. Calls have been made for more studies that better understand the managerial effects of how control technology actually works, or does not work, in practice (Granlund and Mouritsen, 2003; Granlund, 2011) as well as to identify the critical success factors of using IT for MC aims (Corsi et al., 2017).The purposes of this article are to explore how IT actually works, or does not work, for MC reasons and how IT can be utilised to produce favourable effects on and for MC. To capture the true effects of IT requires understanding how the two elements, MC and IT, are practiced together across the firm (Dechow and Mouritsen, 2005). It is the “togetherness” of these two elements that explains the underlying infrastructure of a control technology in operation. How MC are structured and enforced through IT remains an under-researched topic both empirically and theoretically (Granlund and Mouritsen, 2003; Berry et al., 2009; Granlund, 2011). Understanding how IT-structured MCS actually works, or does not work, in practice is not necessarily about which specific system features of IT are selected for use, but rather about how the entirety of the IT is being brought to use. This can be accomplished by examining the intended and unintended outcomes from actual use of IT post-implementation (Jordan and Messner, 2012). How to make IT works in practice plays an important role given that firms tend to purchase ready-made commercial IT solutions (Granlund, 2011). Nonetheless, firms assume these modern solutions can readily replace existing systems and provide for MC (Dechow and Mouritsen, 2005). They ignore the social effects IT solutions give rise to, such as integration issues, managerial concerns and control implications from competing systems within the firms (Granlund and Mouritsen, 2003; Dechow et al., 2007; Berry et al., 2009; Granlund, 2011; Granlund et al., 2013). The ways in which management control systems (MCS) are designed, implemented and organised determine whether they are enabling or coercive (Free,2007; Chapman and Kihn, 2009; Jørgensen and Messner, 2009; Jordan and Messner, 2012). An enabling MCS helps increase the chances of system success as well as improve firm performance (Chapman and Kihn, 2009). A coercive MCS fixates on tasks completion and rules compliance without room for judgment calls (Ahrens and Chapman, 2004). There are four design principles (Adler and Borys, 1996) that distinguish whether a MCS is enabling or coercive (Free, 2007), namely repair, flexibility, internal transparency and global transparency. On the contrary, there are mixed findings about whether all four design principles are needed to determine if a MCS is enabling (Chapman and Kihn, 2009; Dowling and Leech, 2014). Particularly, which design principles play leading/subordinate roles in determining whether a MCS is enabling, as well as in deciding how substantial an impact IT provides on and for MC. This study uses new product development as a context to address this research question.For full paper go to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1467089518300149?via%3Dihub
