Exploring the recent development of management control systems study

The research on management control systems (MCS) is developing in recent decades. However, there is an existing gap in the available literature concerning a comprehensive overview of MCS research. Therefore, this research aimed to provide a summary of the most recent investigation on the relationship between MCS research. To achieve this aim, VOSViewer and R were used as the main analytical tools where data were obtained from the Scopus database from 2003 to 2023. In addition, co-word and co-authorship analyses were used, and the results showed that there was a significant increase in the last two decades despite experiencing fluctuations. The development was determined by several factors, including national productivity, universities as study centers, organizational funding sponsors, journals as publication centers, and author productivity. This exploration identified some well-established themes, namely management control systems, performance management, performance appraisal, human resource management, and performance measurement. However, some themes still needed further development, such as performance indicators, supply chain, recruitment and selection, developing countries, business intelligence, ethics, decision making, governance, and business performance. The development also provided a comprehensive synthesis of fragmented documents and proposed potential themes for future research.