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.

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.

Academic freedom is often equated with protection from political and economic interference. Authoritative definitions are broader. They combine protection from external interference, peer-based evaluation, and institutional arrangements for scholarly self-governance. Drawing on Honneth’s (2014) theory of democratic institutions, this paper develops the second and third elements and integrates all three within a recognition-theoretical framework that reconceptualizes academic freedom as social freedom. Using accounting as a case, we reconstruct two transformations that shape the discipline today: the theory revolution of the 1960s, which consolidated peer-based epistemic recognition, and the journal ranking revolution of the 1990s, which reorganized recognition around performance metrics and publication hierarchies. We show that academic freedom can be hollowed out from within without being formally revoked and argue that a discipline weakened from within is less able to resist external threats. Defending academic freedom requires attention to architectures of recognition through which scholarly worth and truth are organized.