This paper reviews the literature on strategic controls. It summarizes the main theoretical arguments that have been put forward for establishing strategic control systems, and contrasts these arguments with evidence that suggests that few companies in fact have a strutegic control system in place. The paper then identijies some of the diflculties that may be associated with establishing a strategic control system, points up issues that require further empirical research, and suggests a framework for exploring a.contingency theory concerning the sorts of businesses in which strategic control systems would be most and least valuable.

This paper examines the unique functions of corporate headquarters in diversified firms and reports on a survey of the structure and staffing of more than 600 headquarters in Europe, the United States, Japan, and Chile. It explores the extent to which corporate headquarters are contingent on size of the company, corporate strategy (corporate portfolio and corporate structure and policies), and governance system (ownership and regulation, and country of origin). The results confirm that factors in each of these areas are important determinants of the size and structure of headquarters. Performance data suggest that these findings are not merely descriptive but that corporate headquarters should be designed to fit the corporate strategy. Although the results are capable of alternative interpretations, analysis provides no support for the view that 'lean and mean' headquarters lead to better performance.

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Based on a six country survey of nearly 250 multinationals (MNCs), this paper is the first empirical analysis to describe the size and composition of MNC headquarters and to account for differences among them.Findings are that: MNC corporate headquarters are more involved in "obligatory" and value creating and control functions than in operational activities: there are no systematic differences in the determinants of the size and composition of corporate headquarters between MNCs and purely domestic companies: as the geographic scope of an MNC increases two offsetting phenomena occur -headquarters decrease their influence over operational units which ceteris paribus reduces the size of headquarters, but the relative size of obligatory functions at headquarters increases with increased country heterogeneity. The net effect is that the size of corporate headquarters expands as MNC geographic scope increases. The notion of "administrative heritage" is validated as MNCs from different countries have substantially different corporate headquarters -US headquarters are large (220 median staff for a 20,000 FTE MNC) and European headquarters smaller (120).Implications are drawn that countries will lose activities if domestic firms are acquired by foreign MNCs, and that MNCs need to allow more subsidiary autonomy as their geographic scope increases.