In Chapter 3, we offer a brief review of the history of organizational control – from ancient bureaucracies to the behavioral theory of the firm – as well as a discussion of the theoretical foundation underlying organizational control research. We also present the results of a co-citation analysis examining 1,148 organizational control articles published between 1938 and 2022 to illuminate the field’s intellectual base and emerging research fronts. Based on the uncovered intellectual structure of the organizational control field, we review its constituent theories, outline its underlying assumptions, and briefly discuss the critical perspective on organizational control.

The excitement of cognitive psychology as a viable paradigm for contemporary research and application developed from a number of trends deeply imbedded in psychology’s past. In the twentieth century, these influences were clearly evident among the functionalists, the Gestalt movement, Tolman’s purposive behaviorism, as well as in the extended subfields of psychology, such as developmental, social, personality and clinical. In the latter part of the twentieth century, such specified advances as Bartlett’s schema theory, Hebb’s neural networks, and Broadbent’s filter model of attention provided cognitive psychology with substantive direction. The question of artificial intelligence contributed to a paradigm shift through the efforts of pioneers such as Turing and the logical theorist studies of Newell, Shaw and Simon, leading to what is described by some as the cognitive revolution. The seminal research of George Miller, Jerome Bruner, and Ulric Neisser gave cognitive science its form and substance. The question of the sustainability of the cognitive paradigm remains a topic for reflection.