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The recent increased reliance on technological artefacts as a means of control within multinational companies (MNCs) testifies to the poverty of social and cultural structures (such as values, shared meanings and norms) to provide a solid basis for an effective and more durable governance of subsidiaries. In an attempt to avoid the perils associated with an inflation of sociality, on the one hand, and a profusion of material determinism, on the other, we adopt an affordance perspective to show how artefacts offer a more solid basis for control not by virtue of their possessing material properties fixed during the design process, but by virtue of the evolving possibilities of action they make (un)available, depending on the perceptual abilities of the agent and the social and cultural practices they happen to be entangled in. Based on a case study of the design and use of a new technological platform, we conceive of control …