How do management control practices structure other organizational practices? This paper proposes a theory of practice hierarchies. The key idea is that organizations possess constitutive rules that define their character. They are enacted by the practices at the top of the hierarchy. These “anchor practices” contain objectives and established ways of doing things that control, or structure, subsidiary practices. They do so by defining key social relationships in the organization, often ones that are antagonistic. The paper uses illustrations from a longitudinal field study of a retail bank and draws on insights from cultural sociology.

Recent research into the uses of accounting as a technology of government has used Foucault's notion of “counter‐conduct” to shed light on various ways in which the governed can seek to alter the regimes to which they are subjected. This paper unpacks the notion of counter‐conduct further in order to develop a clearer conceptualization of how regimes of government can change over time, with or without clearly identifiable attempts by the governed to influence such changes. We develop our argument based on a longitudinal field study of sustainable waste management practices in a municipality in the English East Midlands. We track the municipality's attempts to become more sustainable in the context of an evolving central government performance management regime that went through a series of legislative and administrative iterations—namely, Best Value, Comprehensive Performance Assessment, and Comprehensive Area Assessment. We conceptualize these iterations of central performance management and the related changes in local government practices and technologies of governing as a series of overlapping “modes of governing” (Bulkeley et al., 2007, Environment and Planning A , 39 (11), 2733–2753). We suggest that accounting research can benefit from the notion of modes of governing because it sheds light on the theoretically expected, but empirically underresearched, copresence of multiple rationales, programs, and technologies of governing, all operating at the same time.

While some field studies have suggested that management control systems can be used simultaneously to make organizations more efficient and more flexible, the contingency literature has found it difficult to address this issue in the absence of a clear and comprehensive typology for analyzing more processual uses of management control systems. This paper distinguishes between enabling and coercive (Adler and Borys 1996) uses of management control systems. Coercive use refers to the stereotypical top‐down control approach that emphasizes centralization and preplanning. In contrast, enabling use seeks to put employees in a position to deal directly with the inevitable contingencies in their work. The design principles that underlie the enabling use of management control systems are repair, internal transparency, global transparency, and flexibility. Through a detailed analysis of a single‐case field study carried out over a two‐year period, we illustrate how management pursued the objectives of efficiency and flexibility by using management control systems in enabling ways. We suggest that the four design principles of enabling use can facilitate field studies of management control systems, but that they can also be used to define an enabling typology for contingency researchers to analyze the ways in which organizations simultaneously pursue efficiency and flexibility through their management control systems.