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.

ABSTRACT The concept of materiality has acquired great significance in sustainability reporting. Through the theoretical bricolage of boundary objects and boundary work and drawing upon 91 interviews, we trace materiality’s evolving role across four interconnected episodes. Our findings show that materiality begins as a multivisionary object that draws the attention of largely unconnected groups. As different actors become more aware of each other, materiality becomes a meeting point object, and then a discursive and bridge-like object for them to talk about their relationships. However, the subsequent escalation of competitive boundary work turns materiality into a divisive institutional object that inhibits cooperation. Moving beyond a view of materiality as a way to distinguish significant information within corporate reports, our analysis fleshes out the visionary and relational roles that materiality has performed in sustainability reporting for a broad range of field-level actors to see themselves and their relationships to others in new lights.