Management control and social software

This research paper discusses two specific phenomena “management control” and “social software”. The aim of this paper is to review the literature on management control and relate this literature to a similar review of the literature on social software. The two key questions raised in this paper are: What are the new challenges in management control posed by the researchers in the scientific literature? Does social software, as an emerging phenomena in organizations, respond the challenges in management control? The research begins by reviewing the literature on management control and pointing out the recent challenges posed by the researchers in management control literature. It then reviews the literature on social software to identify its practical implications in organizations in search of the review questions. The final discussion aims at linking the two literature reviews within a conceptual framework and revealing that social software, with its specific features and implications, may have a facilitation role in the implications of management control in order to rise the challenges recently posed by management control researchers. The principle finding of this paper is that there is a need for rethinking our traditional understanding of management control towards capturing more modern approaches. The review covers a wide literature without analysing the specific aspects of management control in depth which constitutes the main limitation of this paper. It is also worthwhile to mention that the relation between management control and social software is still unclear in the conceptual and empirical literature which presents an opportunity for further work to understand and link these two phenomena in a greater detail.