Control Research - A Review

This article attempts to reflect the current state and progress of control research with a focus on management control as opposed to strategic and operational control. Based on a broad lit-erature review, including accounting, management, and marketing research, the major frame-works of control are discussed. The inter-disciplinary research is organized around an integra-tive framework encompassing key antecedent, control, mediating, and outcome variables, as well as the interrelationship among them. The review reveals that control research has made considerable progress in the past by extending the role of control from the traditional feed-back to more diverse roles. Yet, it failed to provide a rich basis of comparable findings due to the magnitude of different conceptualizations and the selective nature of including control mechanisms in research studies. The authors recommend future empirical research avenues based on two well established control frameworks by using multiple methodological ap-proaches and by drawing on more diverse theoretical perspectives.