Management Control and Uncertainty: Risk Management in Universities

Uncertainty is a prevalent feature of any organizational setting and managers have always faced uncertainty. This uncertainty pre-dates Knight’s (1921) early work on the nature of uncertainty and March & Shapira’s (1987) seminal work on the role of uncertainty in decisionmaking is organizations. Power (2007) argues that when uncertainty is organized, it becomes a risk to be managed. However, the discourse of risk and the way it is managed is not always a feature of the wider management control framework in organizations. And, although the relationship between risk management and management control has been acknowledged both explicitly (Bhimani, 2009; Mikes, 2009, 2011; Soin & Collier, 2013; Woods, 2009) and implicitly (Huber & Scheytt, 2013) in recent literature, the connections (or perhaps the connector(s)) are far from clear. In this chapter, we explore the connection between risk management and management control and argue that both concepts have experienced changes in recent years that have united them under the umbrella of a discourse around accountability.