Management Control as Temporal Structuring

This chapter discusses the relationship between management control and time in organizations. Based on a literature review, we suggest that management control is, to an important extent, the control of organizational time. We show how different forms of control affect the temporal structures of organizational practices and how they influence actors' degrees of autonomy. We then apply these ideas to the case of budgeting practice. We consider the practitioner discourse on budgeting and suggest that, at its core, this discourse is motivated by concerns related to time and temporal structuring. For example, in the Beyond Budgeting debate, a key issue is how management control systems can be organized so as to meet the real-time needs of managers. We draw from this example to outline, in more general terms, what “getting the timing right” in management control might mean