Rethinking Managerial Control in the Contemporary Context: What Can We Learn from Recent Chinese Indigenous Management Research?

Abstract

In this chapter, we revisit the role of managerial control in modern organizations and summarize the challenges faced by experts in the field of managerial control today to rethink managerial control models and tools for agile, adaptative and innovative organizations. For some good reasons, managerial control has often been criticized for not creating value in organizations and being bureaucratic or counter-effective. It is most likely, from our point of view, that managerial control theory will need to embrace new concepts and paradigms in the future if it wants to bring real value to modern, innovative organizations (Stefani et al., Eur J Innov Manag 23:314–328, 2019). In particular, the underlying concepts of rationality in a traditional approach to managerial control would need to be clarified in regard to increasing uncertainty in the business environment (Weber and Schaffer in Behavioral controlling. Springer, Fachmedien, 2019). Some progress has been made recently in indigenous research to provide a research framework that could also be applied advantageously in the field of managerial control (Van de Ven, Engaged scholarship: A guide for organizational and social research. Oxford University Press, 2007). We provide several examples in this area. We explain the definition of modern indigenous research based on most recent publications and provide examples of using such research methods.