While some field studies have suggested that management control systems can be used simultaneously to make organizations more efficient and more flexible, the contingency literature has found it difficult to address this issue in the absence of a clear and comprehensive typology for analyzing more processual uses of management control systems. This paper distinguishes between enabling and coercive (Adler and Borys 1996) uses of management control systems. Coercive use refers to the stereotypical top‐down control approach that emphasizes centralization and preplanning. In contrast, enabling use seeks to put employees in a position to deal directly with the inevitable contingencies in their work. The design principles that underlie the enabling use of management control systems are repair, internal transparency, global transparency, and flexibility. Through a detailed analysis of a single‐case field study carried out over a two‐year period, we illustrate how management pursued the objectives of efficiency and flexibility by using management control systems in enabling ways. We suggest that the four design principles of enabling use can facilitate field studies of management control systems, but that they can also be used to define an enabling typology for contingency researchers to analyze the ways in which organizations simultaneously pursue efficiency and flexibility through their management control systems.

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The existence of management accounting as an unproblematic occupational label is often taken for granted. Prompted by contemporary discussions concerning radical changes in management accounting practice, we sought to examine the extent to which practitioners' accounts of practice demonstrate a coherent occupational identity. Collecting sixty-four occupational autobiographies in seventeen German and twelve British firms we found that management accountants in the two countries constructed common occupational identities out of their diverse experiences. Echoing the findings of anthropological practice theory, the good practitioner rhetorically reconciled a wide variety of contradictory attributes in their occupational idiom.

The Group Questionnaire (GQ) is a recently developed self-report measure of the therapeutic relationship based on Johnson and colleagues (2005) three-factor model; Positive Bonding, Positive Working, and Negative Relationship. This study validated Johnson's model with a new and extended sample and created a shorter 40-item trial version. SEM analysis of the GQ tested whether it produced the same three-factor structure found in three earlier studies with 486 participants from three populations-outpatient university counseling center, non-patient AGPA process groups, and inpatient state hospital. Results of further SEM refinements demonstrated that a final 30-item version had good fit to the three-factor model although distinct differences in response pattern were found between the three populations. Implications for future utility and clinical relevance of the GQ are discussed.

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