Scopus Journal Call for paper: Journal of Managerial Psychology (Rethinking managerial preoccupation with business tournament rituals )

Informed by renewed interest in recognising, rewarding and celebrating excellence, business tournament rituals (BTRs)— 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— offers opportunities for firms to showcase their capabilities and hard market power (Sarpong, 2025). Beyond approving and reinforcing status hierarchies (Anand and Jones, 2008), and the solidarity purpose they serve across industries (Aadland, 2019), BTR awards as nonmarket-oriented artifacts, have been promoted as strategic third-party honours and marketplace endorsements (Anand and Watson, 2004) that spur productivity and performance (Maoret,2023), facilitate innovation (Krishnan, et al.,2021), and stimulate the adoption of good business practices (Asante et al., 2025).

The Economist in 2017 reported that BTRs and their varied awards are not only proliferating as the number of ceremonies rises 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. Beyond the post-selection cost such as award acceptance fee, trophies and merchandise, and ceremony attendance cost, managers are gambling up to £7000 as entry fees for these award competitions. That translates 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.

We concede that BTRs and their awards do hold some strategic value for competing firms (Connelly, et al. 2014). However, emerging evidence suggest that many BTRs and their awards have lost their relevance in today’s highly competitive market (Meléndez-Rodríguez, et al., 2023; Iaquinto, 1999). The quality of some of 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” (Sarpong et al, 2025:2). 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 (Jones et al., 2014). In this regard, 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 (Asante et al., 2022). We argue that 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.

Driven by this growing interest in BTRs in contemporary organizing, and how awards have come to preoccupy managerial attention, 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. Thus, we anticipate that this special issue would provide a forum for collective scholarly discussions that would push the frontiers of research on how managers make sense of BTRs in organizing. Furthermore, 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. We encourage scholars who are actively working in this broad area of BTRs 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.

List of Topic Areas

Managerial mentalities and motivations to competing in BTRs year in year out
Managerial discursive framing of awards within the contingencies of competitive interactions and stakeholders’ engagement
Roles played by managers and internal and external audiences in navigating tacit norms of organizational display of business awards
Unpacking managerial extravagance through the context of business tournament rituals
How managers justify and rationalise their ideational investments in business awards
How managers consume and account for their BTR entries and experiences
How managers craft and communicate information about themselves and their organizations business awards
Multi-industry and national cross-industry context dynamics of BTRs
Narratives of award-winning managers participating in business awards
How managers deploy business awards to attract favourable audience attention
Is it possible that different managers and their firms benefit from different forms of BTRs or that diversity reflects incomplete diffusion?
When and how may BTRs be perceived differently by managers in other regions or industries?
The cognitive processes of managers in (not) recognising the possibilities, potentialities, and limits of BTRs

Submissions Information

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Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”.

Business tournament rituals

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Journal Information: Scopus Journal Q1, H-Index 110