After you have finished this course, you will have a good understanding of at least three themes. First, you will be able to understand and discuss the meaning and importance of management control as a basic part of managerial activity. Second, you will be able to understand and assess the interaction between control problems and organisational arrangements, such as performance measurement and incentives. Third, you will have obtained skills to adequately address control problems in actual practice, which includes data analytics.
Graduates have profound, evidence-based and up-to-date academic knowledge and understanding of theories, methods and tools in business/economics. This includes demonstrating the ability to develop new ideas.
Graduates can apply their profound knowledge and understanding to identify and solve also unstructured or semi-structured real life business/economic problems in unfamiliar environments within broader multidisciplinary contexts. This includes demonstrating analytical skills, data analysis skills and a problem-solving attitude.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THE INFORMATION ABOUT THE TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT METHOD(S) USED IN THIS COURSE IS WITH RESERVATION. THE INFORMATION PROVIDED HERE IS BASED ON THE COURSE SETUP PRIOR TO THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS. AS A CONSEQUENCE OF THE CRISIS, COURSE COORDINATORS MAY BE FORCED TO CHANGE THE TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT METHODS USED. THE MOST UP-TO-DATE INFORMATION ABOUT THE TEACHING/ASSESSMENT METHOD(S) WILL BE AVAILABLE IN THE COURSE SYLLABUS. PLEASE NOTE THAT THE INFORMATION ABOUT THE TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT METHOD(S) USED IN THIS COURSE IS WITH RESERVATION. THE INFORMATION PROVIDED HERE IS BASED ON THE COURSE SETUP PRIOR TO THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS. AS A CONSEQUENCE OF THE CRISIS, COURSE COORDINATORS MAY BE FORCED TO CHANGE THE TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT METHODS USED. THE MOST UP-TO-DATE INFORMATION ABOUT THE TEACHING/ASSESSMENT METHOD(S) WILL BE AVAILABLE IN THE COURSE SYLLABUS.

The central question of this course is: ‘How do managers control the parts of the organisation they are responsible for?’ In other words, we are interested in how managers make sure that organisational participants behave and perform in line with the organisation's objectives. Management Control is an essential managerial task. In this course we will deal with the following questions: What control problems do we observe in practice? In what way can these control problems be solved? What are the effects of management control systems? How can we design and implement adequate management control systems?

Merchant, K.A. and Van der Stede, W.A., Management Control Systems: Performance Measurement, Evaluation and Incentives, Prentice Hall, 3rd edition, 2012.

Repeat or double specialisation students (that started their first specialisation prior to September 2020) who want to follow this course in period 5 have to request a course registration through Ask SBE. This course is not open to students that started their programme in September 2020 or later.

2nd year courses Finance & Accounting (EBC2007) and Management of organisations (EBC2008) or 2nd year courses Accounting II (EBC2002) and Managerial economics (EBC2023).
Intermediate level knowledge on the subject fields of Accounting, Organisational studies or Finance.