Despite the surge in management accounting and control research that acknowledges a dualistic relationship between agency and structure, existing knowledge is inadequate concerning the role of agents and the workings of accounting in relation to change and reproduction of structures. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the relationship between the use of a management control system for accounting work and the ways in which agents interpret key issues in a changing organization and its environment. The empirical evidence derives from a state-owned, public corporation in the extractive industry and includes interviews with financial officers, documents and observations. The results revealing the semantic, power and moral dimensions of structuration and the duality between use of the control system to transform and reproduce interpretations of issues, and the transformation – or attempted transformation – of the control system in response to alternative interpretations. Group staff tend to operate as ‘enforcers’ who uphold the existing interpretations or management control system features or drive their renewal, while operations tend to function as ‘challengers’ who question the dominant interpretations and system features or act in ways that conflict with them. Occasionally, the actors switch between the roles and become ‘jugglers’. The dynamic interplay between control and interpretation occurs on each of the group staff and the operations sides but also between enforcers and challengers through the control system. These findings suggest that there is a need for future research to attend to micro dynamics with a theoretical lens that is sensitive enough to pick up on the subtleties involved and that caution is warranted with respect to management control tools, models and frameworks that promise simplistic causality relationships.