Management control for extraordinary and extreme events

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for organisations to manage risks and uncertainties organically and systematically to mitigate the impacts of extraordinary and extreme events on their activities and decisions. In response, organisations have adopted several actions to deal with them. This chapter presents a first review of the role of management control in guiding organisations’ responses to extraordinary and extreme events. The chapter shows how management control has been mobilised to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic through a comparison with previous financial crises. The chapter also presents some reflections concerning management control and organisational resilience, an important and unexplored area of research, to understand further and explain the role of management control in contemporary organisations and society.