Management control of outsourced activities : An exploratory case study on moroccan national offices

Outsourcing is one of the organizational practices that have increased in popularity over the past decade, even in the public sector. However, management control literature gives a little attention to this new form of organization. Two paradigms dominate the inter-organizational management control literature. The transactional approach based on the Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) and the relational approach taking into account characteristics of the partners. Draws on the inter-organizational literature as well as the management control one, the aim of this article is to identify management control archetypes in an outsourcing context and contingency factors that underlie them. For that purpose, we carried out an exploratory case study upon three Moroccan, publicly owned, offices that are involved since 2000 in a large outsourcing plan. The results indicate that two management control archetypes, combining Ouchi's (1980) control archetypes, can be identified. The first archetype is a combination of the control by the market and the bureaucracy, the second is a combination of the control by the clan and the bureaucracy. The results also suggest that we can explain those inter-organizational control archetypes by contingency factors linked to the institutional, economic and strategic context of the relation and also by the management control system complexity and cost in each outsourcing context.