The Concept of Control in Management Control Research: A Text Mining-Based Comparison of Japan, North America, and Europe

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to clarify the current state and characteristics of management control research through an application of text-mining techniques to objectively selected papers from domestic and international management control research. To achieve this goal, international academic accounting journals are categorized by publication region into North American and European journals, and Japanese accounting journals are also included to enable a comparative analysis across Japan, North America, and Europe. We also analyze the frequency of one-word terms (unigrams) and two-word terms (bigrams) mentioned in management control research across different areas. With regard to the bigrams, we focus on examining which terms co-occur with “management control” and “control”.