This paper explores the role of management control at the metaphorical “last mile” in transmitting knowledge into the actual product through the management-worker boundary. Our understanding of this boundary is based on Taylorist/Fordist understandings of work as manager-directed. This has, in turn, influenced our concepts of Management Control. Although this traditional view of both work and MCS has long been a point of friction, the upswell of methods claiming the alternate foundation of manager-worker collaboration (i.e., TQM, 6-Sigma, and Lean Production (LP)) have placed the Management Control Systems (MCS) metaphor itself under increased strain.

We find that managers in a strong LP organization slowly redefine their understanding of “management control”, placing navigation of the manager-worker boundary at the centre of their conception of management competence and drastically reduced traditional MCS activities.

We propose a new, collective, model of “management” control, which we call Collective Organizational Control (COC). In COC, management retains strategic planning, and many other roles, but “control” in the narrow sense of ensuring that strategy is implemented in the “last mile”, is through an active collaboration with workers.