Résumé
The success of a cooperative endeavor among partners depends in great part on the management control tools that guide their inter-organizational relationships. In this paper, we focus on how management control systems mediate, shape and construct inter-organizational relationships within a horizontal network of partners having different interests. Drawing on the levers of control framework of Simons (1995), we address Dekker’s (2016) call to assess whether an intrafirm control framework can operate effectively in an interorganizational setting. We thus conducted intervention research on the implementation of a balanced scorecard (BSC) in five incubators. We used the concepts of inscription and boundary object to analyze the translation processes that the BSC underwent in each organization. Our results demonstrate that its visual power is effective as an inscription at the inter-organizational level to enable sustainable interactive control. However, this is only so because it also has the characteristics of a boundary object.