Budgetary Systems and the Control of Functionally Differentiated Organizational Activities
通过一家大型电子企业的营销和研发部门对比，研究不同功能活动如何影响预算参与和会计信息依赖等控制策略的效果，对管理会计和组织控制研究者有参考价值。
Considerable attention has been given to the question of the role of budget systems in the control of organizations which differ in terms of characteristics such as size, structure, and diversity (Bruns and Waterhouse [1975] and Merchant [1981]). By contrast, little attention has been directed to the broader question of how characteristics of different functional activities within the organization-e.g., marketing versus R&D-influence the effectiveness of control strategies such as the degree of participation in budget setting and the reliance placed on accounting information in control. Of course, the two questions are related in that differing functional activities are typically structured differently in response to various environmental determinants, and this in turn will influence the choice of controls to be used in each. This paper reports the results of an empirical investigation in which the marketing and R&D units of a large electronics firm were compared in terms of both the environmental conditions they face and the effects of their control system choices on managerial performance within the two functional areas. The results provided limited support for predicted