Is ensuring management rationality a controlling task?

This article shows that the different perspectives on controlling in theory and practice have a common denominator: Controlling stands for ensuring the rationality of management. The reason for the (historical) diversity regarding the definition of controlling and its tasks in business practice is the context dependency of this assurance function. The presence of different management rationality bottlenecks and different mechanisms for coordinating the execution system lead to different controlling task profiles. The variation both in terminology and the respective task profiles is included in the conception of controlling presented in this article. For academic discourse as well as the interaction between academia and business practice, the approach implies in retrospect that recent debates regarding the one true definition of controlling were mostly posturing.