This article presents the findings of an empirical study of 31 large Swedish corporate groups listed on the stock exchange. The purpose of the study was to investigate how strategies, management control systems, and management attitudes influence the possibilities for creating an environmentally driven mode of business development. According to the study, the chances of establishing an environmentally driven mode of business development are substantially better at corporate groups where corporate strategy emphasizes activity sharing and business-unit strategy emphasizes differentiation. The outlook also improves considerably if control is well integrated in the sense that the overall corporate management control system includes information from the environmental management system at the business-unit level. Such integration is easier if the management control system and the environmental management system are similarly designed and used. More, if the mode of business development is to be environmentally drive, corporate and business-unit management should have a favorable attitude toward systematic involvement in environment-related activities.

The point of departure for this paper is a number of contingency-theory studies on the relationship between business strategy and the design and use of management control. In these studies strategy has been operationalized in different ways – a major reason why the findings are ambiguous and difficult to integrate. Thus there is a strong need for a common frame of reference for classifying business strategy. In view of the multifaceted nature of the concept of strategy, however, it is neither desirable nor possible to arrive at a single method of classification that would be appropriate in all situations. Rather, the task is to integrate different strategic variables such as strategic pattern, strategic position and strategic mission. In this paper we show how these three variables may be assumed to influence, and be influenced by, what characterizes changes in strategy and how business units manage their product offerings. Unlike most previous studies in the field, this paper discusses how the strategic variables taken together may be assumed to influence the classification of strategy and thus the design and use of the management-control system. Our deductive analysis, and the hypotheses used in connection with it, show that studies which consider only one strategic variable may lead to erroneous conclusions about the relationship between strategy and management control.

During the past decade there have been considerable changes in methods of management control. To a considerable degree, these changes are due to growing globalization and stiffening competition. In the face of these new challenges, there has been serious dissatisfaction with traditional methods of management control. In the Nordic countries there has been a particular interest in ways to improve performance measurement, especially the Balanced Scorecard. At present, however, our knowledge about how Nordic companies design and use systems of performance measurement is limited. In view of this situation, a questionnaire-based study was conducted. Performance measurement was examined in the following dimensions: (1) structure; (2) processes; (3) use; and (4) benefits and shortcomings. The use of three well-known models of performance measurement was also studied. Responses to the questionnaire were submitted by 236 business units, which belong to major corporate groups in the Nordic countries. The findings show that performance measurement is relatively well developed in the Nordic countries, and that the benefits are perceived as outweighing the shortcomings.