New Product Development Project Managers as Actors

This chapter focuses on management accounting and control in supporting managerial work (Hall 2010), especially new product development (NPD) management, which has not been adequately examined from a managerial-work viewpoint (see e.g. Jørgensen and Messner 2010). Research already acknowledges the presence of multiple, sometimes competing, objectives in NPD projects (Davila and Wouters 2006). These objectives would require the employment of multiple mechanistic or organic controls (Ylinen and Gullkvist 2014). However, the roles given to or taken by individual NPD management actors are not sufficiently understood (for control system challenges, see e.g. Tervala, Laine, Korhonen et al. In press).