Apprentissage Organisationnel et Contrôle de Gestion : Une lecture possible de l'ABC/ABM ?

This article consists of using the Penrosian approach of organisational learning and knowledge to pave the way for future research in the fields of organizational control and management control. The main idea of this contribution lies in understanding management control systems more as cognitive and social technologies than as pure objective tools. From this standpoint, the main issue of developing more sophisticated methods of management control is not only concerned with mastering accounting techniques and tools, but also with interactions between the different members of the firm. These interactions are themselves directly affected by the appropriation and evolution processes of these methods. This approach requires an effort from the firm members who have to learn how to become increasingly autonomous, without becoming incompatible with entrepreneurial behaviour orientation within the main managerial teams. As regard to accounting methods, this approach highlights the weaknesses of traditional management accounting as a response to a Penrosian approach of the firm. Hence, our contribution underlines the improvement, but also the limits of the ABC (Activity Based Costing) method and provides an explanation of the ABM (Activity Based Management) as a managerial approach. The ABM thus seems more likely to reflect the combination and coordination between the various activities of an organisation, with particular emphasis on processes management.