This article provides theoretical and operational groundwork that will facilitate renewed critical interest in developing control configurations during organizational founding. The real opportunity to advance control research lies in synthesizing broad patterns from contingency theory's fragmented concepts and grounding them in rich, multivariate descriptions and that the configurational approach may help consolidate the past gains of contingency theory. Data collected consisted of structured interviews, semi-structured interviews, informal interviews, observations of the operations in Blue Whale Moving Co., and archival material. Organizations, even small start-up firms, face complex challenges in simultaneously evolving the elements of control they apply. Throughout the development of Blue Whale's control systems, various controls were adopted, adapted, abandoned, and rediscovered. Organizational control, as a fundamental and consequential feature of organizations merits a revitalization of attention to both theory and empirical research.
