Organisational governance and discretionary decision-making are central themes in research on both welfare professionals and street level bureaucrats. This paper suggests that it is fruitful to turn the analytic focus in such research from governance vs discretion to how discretionary-decision making is controlled, by elaborating existing analyses of mechanisms for controlling the behaviour and discretion of professionals and frontline bureaucrats. The aim is to understand how discretionary decision-making is controlled by analysing frontline decision-making in four different cases from the Swedish context: dentists, teachers, and case officers in both the Swedish Migration Agency and the Swedish Enforcement Authority. The paper thereby contributes to the research field in two ways. One contribution is to present an empirically comparative study in a field in which research tends to be focused on only one professional group, or a single organisational context or “policy domain”, such as social work, education, healthcare or public bureaucracy. The second contribution is the attempt to refocus the understanding of discretionary decision-making by going beyond the top-down vs bottom-up understanding of discretion as a question of restrictions vs freedom and instead approach the issue from the concept of control. Thereby, we want to highlight that discretionary decision-making is never “uncontrolled” (or “free”) but always embedded in several of mechanisms and processes of control at system-, organisational- and interaction levels.