General provisions

The course is offered within, e.g., the Bachelor's Programme in Business and Economics and as freestanding course, as part of Business Studies A.

Entry requirements

General entry requirements

Learning outcomes

The course aims to provide the student with basic knowledge about management control. After successful completion of the course, the student should be able to:

• describe and explain basic concepts and relationships within management control,
• understand and apply basic concepts and different control tools,
• explain in what situations different control tools are suitable to use and the effects thereof.

Content

Management control focuses on using control tools in order to influence the behavior of actors to achieve the financial and non-financial goals that management formulates given a certain strategy or ideology. Actors are often managers at different hierarchical levels who are responsible for different financial responsibility centers (e.g. cost centers, revenue centers, profit centers, or investment centers) as well as their employees in such centers. One may also want to influence those who work for customers and suppliers because their decisions affect, for example, the company's revenues and costs. But different actors have different goals and this gives rise to goal conflicts. Management has certain goals while the subordinate managers and/or their employees often have other goals. Goal conflicts yield control problems and form the basis for the need for different control tools. And different control problems usually require different control tools to be handled.

The focus of the course is on concepts and relationships linked to formal controls such as responsibility accounting, profit planning, full costing, contribution costing, budgeting, investment calculation, and performance measurement. Such controls can be used to organize, plan, coordinate, calculate or hold actors accountable for various performances, volumes, costs, revenues, profits, profitabilities, present values, annuities and cash flows, in or for organizational units, projects, or products. Recently, a new task has become important for management control-to bring together economic values with social and environmental values in order to achieve sustainable development.

Instruction

Lectures, supervision, written hand-ins and seminars.

Assessment

The student will get one single grade, equivalent to 7.5 credits.

The examination takes place through an individual written test. Grading criteria are presented in the study guide that applies to the course section. The following grades will be used, pass with distinction (VG), pass (G) and fail (U). Examinations handed in late will not be assessed except under special circumstances. Any remaining supplemental work must be handed in by the deadline specified in the study guide.

For students who have not received a passing grade for the course, there is the opportunity to be examined without re-registration via a make-up exam.

If there are special reasons for doing so, an examiner may make an exception from the method of assessment indicated and allow a student to be assessed by another method. An example of special reasons might be a certificate regarding special pedagogical support from the University's disability coordinator.

Uppsala University does not accept cheating or plagiarism. Suspected incidents of cheating or plagiarism are reported to the Vice-Chancellor, which may issue a formal warning to the student or suspend the student from studies for a certain period.

NOTE: Only completed courses can count toward a degree.

Other directives

This course replaces/overlaps among others the following basic courses in business studies: Costing and Capital Budgeting 2FE156, Accounting 2FE154, Accounting A 2FE153, Financial Accounting 2FE151, Business and Markets II 2FE008, Business and Enterprise I 2FE015, Business and Enterprise II 2FE016, Economy, Accounting and Analysis 2FE024, 2FE032, Business Economics 1TG010, Business Studies A/B 2FE025, Management Accounting and Control in Private and Public Organisations 2FE017, Financial Calculation 2FE945.