The gold rush for business excellence awards: A discursive practice approach

Abstract

There has been a proliferation of Business excellence awards (BEAs) in recent times, and the number of businesses entering and winning such awards is on the increase. Embedded in contemporary organising, business excellence awards have evolved to become a useful means to improving recognition in the marketplace, which in turn could facilitate the growth of a firm's customer base and drive it to achieve sustainable competitive advantage over their market rivals. In spite of its current relevance in contemporary organising, scholarly work examining this phenomenon remains scattered with the dominant narrative focusing on the intensive, even obsession with award entry preparation. This study examines how firms compete with each other for BEAs, and how they utilise them as symbolic tokens to achieve competitiveness. Drawing on the practice turn in contemporary social theory as a lens, the study explores how the material, meaning, and competence elements of BEAs, in context, interact and combine to give form and shape to BEAs as a practice in contemporary organizing. Adopting an explorative qualitative research design, the research contribution is developed in the context of a UK regional and national BEAs. Data for the inquiry comes from forty-five (45) semi-structured interviews with managers and owners of firms who won or were nominated for an award at one of the BEAs studied. This was supplemented with publicly available data on the BEAs, and the websites and social media pages of the firms studied. The study presents three main findings. First, emphasising the actions and situated practices that cohere to drive the competition for BEAs, the study identifies the internal and external influences that fuel firms desire to compete for these BEAs, suggesting that the significance of BEAs in achieving market competitiveness and other important organisational outcomes makes it an imperative ritual which firms cannot afford to ignore or boycott. Second, shedding light on why firms are keen on competing for BEAs, even if they cannot justify the value in terms of their balance sheets, the thesis unpacks the motivations and mentalities driving firms to compete for BEAs year in year out. Lastly, offering insight into why firms prioritise a particular BEA or award category, the thesis delineates the choices firms make when it comes to BEAs and identifies the potential value firms frequently capture from BEAs. The contribution of this study is also three-fold. First, the study in adopting the practice turn in contemporary social theory as a lens provides an alternative interpretation of how firms in their everyday organizing come to make sense of BEAs, and how the practice of BEAs in itself has evolved over time to shape the creation and capture of value for competitiveness. Second, it extends our understanding as to why many firms are keen to expend significant amount of their time and limited resources into preparing, entering, and competing for BEAs. Finally, in studying and theorising BEAs in the form of strategizing, the thesis extends our understanding of how firms could potentially turn their business excellence award fortunes into market competitiveness.