An Action Approach to Control Systems

The role of budgets in organisations has received much attention from accounting theorists over the 20 years since Stedry's experiments on budget‐setting. In that time there has been a difference of emphasis between theorists in the United States, who have concentrated on the relation of the budget to the individual, and the European theorists, who have been more concerned with organisational aspects of budgets (Cooper, 1981). Individual and organisational aspects are not, of course, completely different: there is a considerable mutual influence between them. Nevertheless, the tradition is somewhat different, and the related discipline has in the USA tended to be psychology, whereas Europeans have tended to turn more to systems approaches to the sociology of organisations.