Essays on internal audit, management control and corporate communication

This dissertation presents two essays that, taken together, focus on the work performed by the Internal Audit Function (IAF) of 18 firms to examine issues of management control and corporate communication.;The first essay investigates the blurred boundary between management control and internal control. Using concepts from organizational ecology the essay describes how continued pressure for an organization to become more reliable and accountable often leads to the routinization of organic, adaptive control systems. Over time mechanistic routines can become misaligned with a changing environment, or begin to break down and cease functioning as intended. Interview evidence from IAF managers in a diverse set of complex firms presents this erosion of control as their primary opportunity to add value and improve operations. They do so through consulting and compliance work aimed at facilitating increased communication and the correction of identified deficiencies. The essay proposes a comprehensive conceptual model to describe control system maintenance through two interrelated cycles: 1) consulting work aimed at correcting control system inertia through horizontal communication and organic control; and 2) compliance work aimed at correcting control system entropy through vertical communication and mechanistic control. It concludes with a comparison to the growing literature on Enterprise Risk Management and an argument for the proposed concept model's potential for further study of control system maintenance.;The second essay investigates changes to management accounting work alongside the growing sophistication of automated reporting tools such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Business Intelligence (BI). A growing professional and academic literature indicates the growth of ERP and BI has diffused and hybridized traditional management accounting tasks into work performed by the broader organization. The Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) recently addressed this trend in a redefinition of management accounting with a focus on consultative, qualitative work as a business partner. Analysis provided in this second essay demonstrates the business partner role to be a professionally contested space, with multiple organizational functions vying for jurisdiction over work relevant to the strategic management of a firm. Using a series of semi-structured interviews with IAF managers at a set of large, complex firms my study provides additional insight into work performed by a business partner to coordinate action across functional, hierarchical, and geographic boundaries. In doing so, the essay identifies two concepts key to work as a business partner as intriguing opportunities for further research: 1) the ability to coordinate sensemaking activity between a distributed set of process participants; and 2) control over strategic/operationally relevant boundary objects necessary to legitimize access, place global/local reports into context, and drive strategic change.