• Strategic orientation to control systems highlights how top managers deploy control mechanisms to direct attention to strategic uncertainties and cultivate new strategic initiatives, elevating control beyond simple exception reporting [1] while governance and ownership shapes performance expectations across firms [9], [16], [17], [18].

• Autonomy and accountability emerge as core prerequisites for effective operation of public and quasi-public enterprises, challenging binary autonomy models with more nuanced arrangements such as performance contracts and governance design that influence outcomes [2], [13], [16], [17].

• Concertive control and non-bureaucratic regimes reframe control from formal hierarchy to normative rules within self-managing teams and JIT contexts, producing strong alignment or resistance as workers reinterpret rules and managers monitor compliance [3], [11], [15].

• Service and product contexts drive design of management control models that emphasize customer-facing processes and innovation, shifting focus from cost control to service quality, process management, and new product oversight [12], [8], [19].

• Managerial cognition shapes control design via problem categorization and conceptions of control, with expert–novice comparisons and upward feedback dynamics illustrating how mental models constrain or enable effective control systems [20], [18], [10], [15].