Strategy and Management Control Systems: How are they interrelated?

The purpose of the paper is to study the role of strategy and its change in the use of Management Control Systems (MCS) in a particular company. In this paper, Miles and Snow's (1978) definition of strategy is adopted. Our results show that in the defender period the case company focused on traditional basic MCS' information. Then it made a very distinctive shift from defender to prospector strategy. In these phases MCS changes followed strategy changes. The paper's major contribution is that it incorporates a wider range of controls, including informal mechanisms, as opposed to the majority of prior studies.