Browsing by Author "Asante, Shadrack"

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    Advancing the common good through business excellence awards: A legitimacy-seeking perspective
    (Wiley, 2024-10-01) Asante, Shadrack; David, Sarpong; Eunice, Aidoo; Adekunle Isaac Ogunsade
    Competing for and winning business excellence awards (BEAs) is essential for firms' long-term performance. However, the role of these BEAs in inspiring good and generating sustainable business practices has often been overlooked. In this article, we draw on the legitimacy-seeking theory to explore the “socially good” transformations firms go through by competing for BEAs. Data for the inquiry come from semi-structured interviews with managers whose firms competed in two BEAs in the United Kingdom. Providing insight into BEAs as a competitive legitimating frame in organizing, our findings shed light on how BEAs may serve as competitive crucibles that provide opportunities for feedback and learning, potentiality for brand positioning, and a possibility for stimulating excellence in the adoption of good business practices. The implications of these findings for the theory and practice of advancing the “common good” are outlined.
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    Collecting badges: Understanding the gold rush for business excellence awards
    (Wiley, 2022-03-02) Asante, Shadrack; Sarpong, David; Bi, Jianxiang; Mordi, Chima
    Business excellence awards (BEAs) have become all too commonplace. Entering and winning one has now become part of contemporary organising. However, scholarly work examining these awards remains scattered, with the dominant narrative focusing on what could even be described as the intense obsession with award ceremonies. In this paper, we articulate the mechanisms through which the dual demands for managing competitive pressures and achieving competitive advantage drive organisations to enter these awards. In doing this, we integrate and expand upon prior work to explicate an integrative framework for examining how the interactions between various contextual and environmental factors may induce organisations to enter BEAs and the potential outcomes, particularly for those who win or are shortlisted for these awards. We go on to present a set of propositions constituting a contribution, after which our study's implications for the theory and practice of BEAs are outlined.
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    How managers ‘make meaning’ of business tournament rituals
    (Elsevier, 2025-01-23) Sarpong, David; Asante, Shadrack; Siaw, Christopher Agyapong; O’Regan, Nicholas; Boakye, Derrick
    In this paper, we examine how managers ‘make meaning’ of business tournament rituals (BTRs)— recognition-based contests in which participating firms get social endorsements and winners receive prestigious awards. In exploring two UK BTRs, we found that managerial orienting systems, made up of beliefs about the identity of their firm, competitors, and customers, and what it takes to compete in their environments, drive managers to compete in BTRs. Their interpretive view of BTRs as sources of strategic capabilities and hard market power, we argue, is constructed, and projected to the viewing public through a set of four distinct but ‘durationally indivisible’ temporal frames: validating identity and values, competence signalling, product/service differentiation, and market and industry visibility; these may operate in combination or serially account for the observed managerial preoccupation with BTRs. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory, practice, and future research.
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    ‘Mining women’ and livelihoods: Examining the dominant and emerging issues in the ASM gendered economic space
    (Sage, 2024-01-09) Asante, Shadrack; Ofosu, George; Sarpong, David; Torbor, Mabel
    The intractable challenges faced by female mine workers have come to dominate the discourse and scholarship on artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) operations. However, the extensive focus on the informal and labour-intensive segments has engendered a failure to capture the nuances in the duality of ASM operations and how it impacts female outcomes. Drawing on intersectionality as a lens, in this article the authors map the dynamics on how issues related to the gender, situatedness and positionality of female mine workers interact to shape their situated labour outcomes. Highlighting the differentiated outcomes for female mine workers within the contingencies of the broader socio-cultural context in which ASM work is organised, the article sheds light on how the social identity structures such as gender, sexuality and class interact to give form to the marginalisation, occupational roles, the ‘boom town’ narrative and occupational and health challenges that characterise the ASM gendered economic space.