Most management control research conceptualizes control as a top-down process, positioning central management as the primary architect of control systems. This thesis challenges this perspective, arguing instead that control is shaped by multiple actors and should be examined from perspectives beyond the managerial one. Through three empirical articles, the thesis explores how non-managerial workers perform, reshape, and resist control at the individual, organizational, and national levels.

At the individual level, the article Time to care? The temporal structuring of home care work, presents an ethnographic study of home care planning and delivery. It reveals how care workers and administrators adapt, modify, or disregard the outputs of the formal, semi-automated planning system. The analysis highlights how the control of care visits depends in no small part on the actions of individual workers and on relationships between workers. Ultimately, the article argues that care workers perform control work in addition to care work.

At the organizational level, the article Seizing overflows: exploring how accounting becomes emancipatory uses archival materials to analyze a decade-long accounting reform process in a home care organization. It demonstrates how a management accounting reform created stressful working conditions for care workers, who then mobilized health and safety legislation to resist these changes. The reform was ultimately reversed, illustrating how workers can shape control by highlighting the unintended consequences of managerial decisions.

At the national level, the article Winning the debate but losing the message employs mixed methods to trace a national campaign by care workers’ unions against ’minute-based control’ in home care. While the campaign succeeded in raising awareness and criticism of the concept at the national level, local efforts to change control practices faltered due to disagreements over the term’s meaning. Despite this finding of failure to push through a substantive change, the article shows how workers can set the agenda for discussions on control.

Drawing on these three articles and on critical accounting and management studies, the dissertation develops a conceptualization of worker agency in relation to organizational control. Specifically, it posits that workers combine varying levels of challenges to (1) organizational assumptions about control, and (2) organizational power relations, in order to bring control practices closer to what they view as quality work. This contributes theoretically to critical accounting research by nuancing the debate on how actors may use accounting for emancipatory purposes. It also demonstrates the potential for studying control systems without centering management. In doing so, it opens avenues for emancipatory research approaches in the study of organizational control.