Kontrollin käsite muutoksessa: käskytyksestä kohti asiantuntijaohjausta

Abstract

Management control is a prerequisite for a coordinated and efficient organization having - as a multilayered conception – utterly ambiguous meanings. Control has no sole, coherent definition and the translation between Finnish and English brings about even more confusion. Alongside industrialization, strict control in organizations was adopted. Later, the advances in education and technology have changed the idea of worker as an organizational actor and mechanistic human conception has fractured. However, the mainstream in management literature still treats control as an essential yet excessive managerialist way: Control is a top-down activity which belongs to the management. In this article, we aspire to structure and analyze the conception on management control. We have applied conceptual analysis on the management control literature. We ask, does present day worker still need authoritative direction and strict external control systems – or should s/he be seen as an expert, active actor, who aspires to process and make sense of her/his opera-tional environment. As a result, we propose redefined conception to management control, actor-control, which considers the appropriate domain of expertise.