Business tournament rituals (BTRs) are ritualistic ceremonies or events organised to serve solidarity and confer social prestige and endorsements on firms in which participating firms and winners receive accolades and prestigious non-monetary prizes. They offer opportunities for firms to showcase their capabilities and hard market power. Beyond approving and reinforcing status hierarchies and the solidarity purpose they serve across industries, BTR awards as nonmarket-oriented artifacts have been promoted as strategic third-party honours and marketplace endorsements that spur productivity and performance, facilitate innovation, and stimulate the adoption of good business practices.
BTRs and their awards are proliferating, with the number of ceremonies rising by about 5% annually. They have come to dominate the attention economy with at least 2,000 such ceremonies or events held in a year in Britain alone. Managers are gambling up to £7000 as entry fees for these award competitions, translating into tens of thousands of cost, and also titles, industry awards, and trophies being presented each year, which get strewn on corporate letterheads, business cards, email signatures, websites, and advertising banners.
While BTRs and their awards do hold some strategic value for competing firms, emerging evidence suggests that many BTRs and their awards have lost their relevance in today's highly competitive market. The quality of some BTRs and their awards have also come to vary substantially, with some being characterised as 'vanity awards' representing cases of scamming and borderline corruption where recipients of these awards are forced to pay for attendance, trophies, or certificates. Of particular salience is the intractable challenge in accounting for the economic value of these ceremonies and their awards in terms of the balance sheet.
The scale and proliferation of BTRs, the unabated surge of interest in winning awards, the value of resources expended to competing in BTRs, and the general managerial preoccupation with BTR continue to confound commentators and the viewing public. Understanding how managers construe, understand, or make sense of BTRs and awards is essential to improving our understanding of convergent firm behaviour towards BTRs, the conditions required for firms to consider entering BTRs, and their tendency to compete in them, even when they cannot quantitatively justify the potential value they could create and capture from these awards.
This special issue aims to attract multi-disciplinary research drawing on qualitative and quantitative methodologies and methods, including mixed methods, and conceptual pieces, to explicate an expanded view on managerial preoccupation with BTRs. The special issue will provide a forum for collective scholarly discussions that would push the frontiers of research on how managers make sense of BTRs in organizing. Exploring the contexts within which BTRs could shape the values, identities, and careers of managers could yield important perspectives to build theoretical explanations for stimulating and structuring managerial and organisational field behaviour and evolution. Scholars are encouraged to address existing challenges of BTR for managers, define new pathways and identify possibilities and potentialities to rethinking BTRs, and provide fresh insights that would set the roadmap for further enquiries.