ABSTRACT
There is an assumption that budget control often plays a symbolic or ritualistic role in healthcare while medical staff remain unsupportive. In this chapter, we look at attempts to explain this on account of poor design of management control practices and explore suggestions for improving this via greater engagement of healthcare staff including studies which explore the behavioural responses of healthcare management to the operation of budgetary control practices (King and Clarkson, 2015). This is complemented by a review of research on medical staffs’ responses which emphasise organisational, external and individual influences on attitudes to budget control.
