This study investigates which objectives in the corporate balanced scorecard (CBSC) that corporate managers in large unlisted companies focus on within corporate control. It also investigates what the explanatory factors are for the corporate managers’ focus. The CBSC was proposed to alleviate the historical financial focus of managers in control activities. This study makes a contribution by reviewing corporate managers' focus on financial and non-financial CBSC-objectives in corporate control. A multiple case study was conducted, consisting of a mutually owned and a governmentally owned company, where data was collected from semi-structured interviews, internal documents and observations. Results indicate that corporate managers from the mutually owned company primarily focused on financial and customer objectives. Corporate managers in the governmentally owned firm primarily focused on financial objectives, complemented with quality objectives. Although having a mixed influence, the perceived complexity of measures, relationship between objectives and capital market pressure promoted corporate managers’ focus. The conclusion of this study is that financial objectives are prioritised in corporate control because of the influence of the three explanatory factors.

Research on task-based language teaching (TBLT) offers a large body of evidence suggesting that cognitive task complexity influences learners’ language production and development. Studies that investigate task complexity, however, provide contradictory results on the way different linguistic aspects of performance are affected by the manipulation of cognitive task complexity. The empirical study presented in this degree project aimed to investigate the effect of task complexity on the accuracy, complexity and fluency in learners ́ written performance. An additional goal of the study was to examine whether proficiency level would mediate the effects of cognitive task complexity. In order to explain the influence of cognitive task complexity on linguistic performance two theoretical models are used and discussed, namely Skehan’s Limited Attention Capacity Hypothesis (Skehan 2015) and Robinson’s Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson 2001, 2011, 2015). In order to answer the research questions guiding the study, 71 Swedish high school students of Spanish performed a simple or a more cognitively complex version of a written task. Results showed that increasing task complexity had a positive effect on the fluency, accuracy, and complexity of the participants ́ written performance, and that these effects were greater among the high proficiency participants’ productions. These results offer valuable implications for syllabus and task designers, language teachers and examiners, as well as second and foreign language researchers.