This chapter delves into the concept of legitimacy and introduces the readers to key debates on regulatory legitimacy. The concept of legitimacy has been extensively studied by scholars from various academic disciplines, including political theory, legal theory, political science, sociology and management studies. The resulting body of scholarship has, however, tended to remain in disciplinary siloes, making the study of legitimacy difficult to navigate. Chapter 11 offers first an exploration of different legitimacy claims that justify why individuals recognize an authority and its rules as legitimate. The chapter then moves to regulatory legitimacy.

Chapter 9 explores regulatory compliance, enforcement and certification. It analyses the vital role of enforcement action and how rules aimed at influencing human and institutional behaviour are translated into social reality. It draws attention to the human interaction that takes place during encounters with regulatory enforcement officials and regulators. We discuss how ‘risk-based’ approaches to regulation can be understood and operationalised. It then touches upon the investigatory powers of public regulators, and the nature, purpose and variety of regulatory sanctions. Finally, it examines the role of ‘private’ bodies and other ‘regulatory intermediaries’ in certifying that a regulatee’s activities complies regulatory standards which purport to offer consumers, as primary beneficiaries, ‘assurance’ of the quality of the resulting outputs.

In Chapter 6, we present our reconceptualization of organizational control. We discuss four fundamental shifts in organizations – from face-to-face work to remote work; from stable, full-time work to alternative work arrangements; from human managers to algorithmic control; and from traditional to platform-mediated gig work – and discuss the impact of these shifts on organizational control. Our reconceptualization consists of both a conceptual part, where we advance a configurational approach to model the causal complexity inherent in organizational control, and an empirical part, where we present exemplary archetypes of control configurations across a variety of twenty-first-century organizations, including US trucking companies, GitLab, Amazon warehouses, Uber, and Upwork.

Chapter 10 provides an overview of the role and functions of private enforcement within regulatory regimes and the availability of redress. It draws attention to different ‘models of legal responsibility’ upon which regulatory regimes rely in allocating and distributing legal rights and duties between those who are subject to regulation and those whom regulation is intended to protect (‘regulatory beneficiaries’). This chapter is the most legally focused chapter in the volume, selectively highlighting several features of the institutional and enforcement context in which regulation occurs. Examples are private litigation, collective redress mechanisms, the role of courts as authoritative and final interpreters of the law and ‘alternative’ avenues for redress.

This book focuses on the management challenges associated with developing the strategies, building the organizations, and managing the operations of companies whose activities stretch across national boundaries. Operating in an international rather than a domestic arena clearly presents managers with many new opportunities. Having worldwide operations not only gives a company access to new markets and low-cost resources, it also opens up new sources of information and knowledge and broadens the options for the strategic moves the company might make to compete with its domestic and international rivals. However, with all these new opportunities come the challenges of managing strategy, organization, and operations that are innately more complex, diverse, and uncertain.

Chapter 12 discusses accountability in regulation. Accountability is part of a family of concepts that relate to the exercise of power and its abuses. It construes the relationship between regulators and regulatees according to principal-agent theory and explains how accountability can be an important mechanism for requiring answerability, ensuring that agents (regulators) do not drift from the interests of regulatees. The chapter explains that accountability consists of four elements: (i) a duty to explain; (ii) exposure to scrutiny; (iii) a potential ‘sanction’ or a consequence of some kind; and (iv) the possibility of being subject to independent review.

There are many different types of regulatory instruments and tools. Chapter 6 classifies and examines regulatory tools according to their underlying technique or ‘modality’ of control or source of influence, examining five such modalities in turn: command, competition, communication, consensus and code (or ‘architecture’). This chapter also considers algorithmic regulation and the role of reputation as a form of regulation.

In Chapter 2, we perform a systematic, cross-disciplinary review of the most influential journal articles on organizational control to synthesize our definition of organizational control. We provide a comparison of how organizational control has been conceptualized across the disciplines of accounting, information systems (IS), management, marketing, and operations management, and present a citation network that illustrates the multidisciplinary intellectual underpinnings of our control definition as well as influential articles that have shaped the field’s understanding of organizational control. We conclude our conceptualization of organizational control by discussing overlap and differences with related constructs, such as power, structure, culture, and the locus of control.

As earlier chapters have made clear, the twenty-first century multinational enterprise (MNE) is markedly different from its twentieth century ancestors. It has been transformed by an environment in which multiple, often conflicting forces accelerate simultaneously. The globalization and deglobalization of markets, the acceleration of product and technology life cycles, the assertion of national governments’ demands, and, above all, the intensification of global competition have created an environment of complexity, diversity, and change for most of today’s MNEs.

In Chapter 4, we review the multi-disciplinary organizational control literature, synthesize its key elements, and present a comprehensive theoretical framework that includes the dimensions of organizational control, the control functions or mechanisms describing how the control dimensions influence outcomes, the control outcomes, and key contingencies. We further submit our framework to an empirical test by examining the proposed relationships with a multidisciplinary meta-analysis of 293 articles, published between 1967 and 2022, that analyzed 310 independent samples, for a total sample size of 110,585. The results of this analysis provide broad support for the key tenets of organizational control theory, including antecedents and control–outcome relationships.

The results also suggest the presence of numerous context factors and contingencies, as well as significant interaction effects between controls, including both complementary and substitution effects among controls. Together, these results attest to the powerful impact, but also the causal complexity, of organizational control.