Abstract
Despite the gold rush for business excellence awards (BEAs), their direct impact on balance sheets cannot be verified; neither can their economic value to firms be justified. So we ask, how do managers make meaning of BEAs to provide a foundation for their competitive actions? Developing our contribution in the context of regional and national BEAs, data for our inquiry comes from semi-structured interviews with managers and owners of firms who have won or been nominated for an award at one of the BEAs we studied. We identified the managerial meaning-making of BEAs as being played out in the form of four distinct, but mutually constitutive, ‘durationally indivisible’ frames—(a) elite status anxiety; (b) conversation with an imaginary audience; (c) striving for self-verification, and (d) staking out territories—which may operate in combination or serially to orient managers to pursue the stretched ambition of ‘strategic levelling-up’—neutralizing hard market power of competitors while retaining the widest possible range of strategic capabilities that can facilitate their ability to compete fairly. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory, practice, and future research.