Abstract
While their economic value remain contested, business excellence awards (BEAs) have come to dominate contemporary organising. In this article, we draw in novel fashion on ideas from Gold Coast Asafo companies, a west African socio-historical legacy to develop an alternative interpretation of the gold rush for business excellence awards in contemporary organizing. Explicating the parallels between the Asafo and BEAs, we theorise how BEAs winners, in the context of dominant market logics of social evaluations, combine elements of Asafo rituals, symbols, and images to signal their status identity and distinctive reputation to the watching public. We present archetypal mentalities of firms that potentially drive the intensive, even obsession with BEAs, when their economic value remain difficult to be justified. We conclude by presenting some implications of our study for the theory and practice of BEAs in contemporary organizing.