ABSTRACT This paper examines how accounting and control practices constitute and distribute agency and responsibility for sustainability in global supply chains. Drawing on a field study in the fashion industry, we describe the sustainability control practices used by a major buyer firm vis‐à‐vis its suppliers and trace their evolution from a “compliance‐based” to a more “collaborative” regime. We find that these controls did not simply guide, monitor, or assess supplier firms; they responsibilized them in a more fundamental sense, namely by virtue of scripting the suppliers' actorhood . We show how such scripting evolved in ways that enabled the buyer to progressively distance itself from certain sustainability and control problems, as emergent controls produced the legitimate supplier as an actor who can, and should, address sustainability in an increasingly autonomous and entrepreneurial manner. A key argument that we therefore develop is that sustainability control practices operate as technologies of actorhood that not only address sustainability problems but also redistribute locales of moral authority and responsibility in interorganizational settings—not only among actors but also into the invisible hand of the market. We further show how such constitution of organizational actorhood relies on, and triggers, processes of subjectivation at the individual level, as members come to embody their organization's imagined actorhood.

This study examines the influence of cultural regions on the interdependence between delegation of authority and other management control (MC) practices. In particular, we assess whether one of the central contentions of agency theory, that incentive contracting and delegation are jointly determined, holds in different cultural regions. Drawing on prior literature, we hypothesise that the MC practices that operate as a complement to delegation vary depending on societal values and preferences, and that MC practices other than incentive contracting will complement delegation in firms in non-Anglo cultural regions. Using data collected from 584 strategic business units across three Western cultural regions (Anglo, Germanic, Nordic), our results show that the interdependence between delegation and incentive contracting is confined to Anglo firms. In the Nordic and Germanic regions, we find that strategic and action planning participation operate as a complement to delegation, while delegation is also complemented by manager selection in Nordic firms. Overall, our study demonstrates that cultural values and preferences significantly influence MC interdependence, and suggests that caution needs to be taken in making cross-cultural generalisations about the complementarity of MC practices.