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 tools mediate, shape and construct inter-organizational relationships within a horizontal network of partners having different interests. Cooperation in this type of network might well be tenuous at times, and thus our objective is to explore how these tools are able to maintain and even strengthen the interactions of network organizations over the long term. We conducted an empirical intervention on the implementation of a balanced scorecard in five incubators in the same network. The findings show that cooperation can be maintained over time with the support of a management control tool combining characteristics of both an inscription and a boundary object. The strong visual power of the tool as an inscription encourages and facilitates interactions and cooperation between organizations, whereas its interpretive flexibility as a boundary object helps resolve controversies arising from the organizations’ diverging interests. This results in the reinforcement of cooperation and its maintenance over time.