Management control systems (MCS) are designed to achieve the greatest possible goal congruence, where people pursue personal goals that conduce to the organizational goal. Use and design of MCS are crucial aspects for achieving goal congruence, but they are thought to be contingent to specific external situations. We attempt to analyse that justice in the design and fairness in the use of MCS are required to achieve specific levels of goal congruence independently of the situation.We derive that there are two stable types of goal congruence, labeled maximum goal congruence (where the MCS design is just and the user is just) and minimum goal congruence (where the MCS design is unjust and the user is unjust); and two unstable types of goal congruence, in which goal congruence is occasional (unjust MCS design used justly) or perverse (just MCS design used unjustly).

In this paper, we review the conventional analyses of management control systems, to conclude, first, that the ''illusion of control'' can mislead managers into believing that everything can be controlled and monitored, and, second, that no incentive system based only on extrinsic rewards can motivate individuals properly. Then, we investigate the philosophical foundations of the basic assumptions that, implicitly or explicitly, are made about the nature of the acting person. Based on personalist phenomenology, we show how the development of technical and moral values is crucial to the long-run survival of organizations. We end by offering some guidelines as to what control systems should be like in order to be compatible with the nature of human persons.

There are many theories about organizations that are mutually inconsistent with each other, which explain phenomena to very similar extents. Most of them ignore the ethical dimension completely. In this paper I put forth the basic principles for a theory of decision-making in organizations which integrates ethics in the core of the theory. It is based on the work of Juan Antonio Pérez López (1991, 1993) and is essentially a humanistic view of the interrelationships between people and its implications for organizational decision-making. I will first show that in any relationship between two people, the learning of the two is crucial for such a relationship to last; and then I will expand on the different aspects of that learning. This analysis will then be applied to the organizational context as a basis for organizational decision-making, Second, it applies the previous analysis to the organizational context as a basis for organizational decision making, showing how any decision in an organization needs to be analyzed on the basis of three criteria (short-run effectiveness, development of distinctive competence, and unity and identification with the organization) and how ethics is included in the last two.

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In light of the recent crisis and its aftershocks, it becomes crucial to reflect on the relationship between finance and accounting and on how to integrate ethics and efficiency, as well as on how to motivate and empower practitioners in the world of finance to commit to justice, fairness and enhanced understanding, and to improving their personal integrity. This article, written as an editorial introduction to a special issue includes works related to control measurement and ethical behavior, misbehaviors in finances and accounting, professionalism in accounting, ethical investing and corporate reporting. We conclude by suggesting further research for a better integration of technical aspects of accounting and finances into business activity-human activity actually-and an for understanding of ethics not limited to rules, but as a mutual and interdependent system of values (human goods), virtues and principles.

We analyze the status of virtues in management by going in some depth into the two main virtues, justice and practical wisdom. We next study how ethics requires that all virtues should be present under the ideal concept of a ‘unity of virtues’ for a completely wise person and discuss the practical limitations of this concept. Then, we draw a framework for decision making depending on whether the decision maker possesses justice and practical wisdom or lacks one of them and then discuss which one is better to have. We conclude that justice is more important, as it is about setting objectives and prioritizing, whereas practical wisdom is about attaining these objectives, once listed, in a rationally wise and contextual way. Hence, we conclude that objectives (justice) must come first, because this makes it more likely that, in the end, practical wisdom is developed, and thus we end up having the two virtues.

business ethics, ethical foundations of organization, trust, management theory, learning,

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