Investigating management control system in the new sustainable and digital business environment

In today’s business environment, two prominent trends are smart technologies and sustainability. Companies are embracing these trends and pushing themselves to thrive in this new ecosystem. To stay competitive and overcome these challenges, organisations must renew their strategies, business models, decision-making processes, and management control systems. Among these components, management control plays a pivotal role in guiding firms through the journey of sustainable and digital transformation. This research aims to examine the transformations occurring in the management control system, both in terms of procedures and tools, when a company adopts smart technologies to achieve sustainability goals. Through a qualitative-deductive research methodology and a comprehensive literature analysis, we develop a critical analysis on the relevant issues emerging during the study. The findings reveal that the primary changes manifest in the configuration of management control, which evolves into a real-time and simultaneous control mechanism for all three dimensions of sustainability.