Appropriate control strategy leads to improved public management. Public management control requires a frame of reference that assists practicing managers in recognizing and responding to the various control problems found in the organizational environments of public programs. Typically, these problems include the following: program goals are diverse or ambiguous; agency employees are driven by widely differing intemalized value systems and harbor goals that conflict with goals of other employees as well as with program goals; tasks vary with respect to the available knowledge of the process required to carry out the task; and, in some cases, tasks vary with respect to one's ability to detect when, or even if, the task is completed. The variable combinations of these elements tend to form complex public management problems that require different approaches to management control. This is true in the analysis and fine-tuning of existing control systems for programs in place as well as in the design of prospective control systems for emerging programs. Need for a Framework for the Analysis of Control Problems Management literature is filled with different approaches, techniques, and methods that have been suggested as being useful for maintaining control in organizations. The range of such literature is wide. Political economists, sociologists, social psychologists, organizational theorists, accountants, program evaluators, and organizational economists all address control in organizations. Control issues are approached in the literature at different levels of analysis; they are analyzed from the perspectives of different social assumptions; and separate studies of similar control issues produce multiple, often incompatible