Awards and prizes as control devices: The case of urban development project awards

Abstract

In the credential society, a sharp growth of the number of awards and prizes indicate an interest in assuming the authority to define quality, and to identify extraordinary accomplishments within certain jurisdictional domain. This ambition is associated not the least with ex ante awards, awards granted on basis of plans and documents that stipulate forthcoming material contributions, or other projected accomplishments. Drawing on actor network theory, the role of ex ante awards in the field of urban development is examined. Despite being epistemologically fragile entities, ex ante awards are organizationally significant as they operate as actants that provide a variety of benefits for equally award-winning agents and award-giving organizations, but also for the specific industry sector more generally. The article reports empirical data from two urban development projects in a major Swedish city, eventually receiving ex ante awards. Both projects were associated with desirable urban development qualities, boundary–spanning interests and objectives, and a recognition of shared social norms, and the awards given arguably served to strengthen the relationships between the actors included in the project work, at the same time as award-giving organizations advance their authority to define quality. The study contributes to the scholarly literature on awards by presenting an integrated analytical framework that shed light on the direct and indirect effects of formal awards. Awards and prizes are devices that enable control in credential societies, yet being undertheorized to date, and more research that examines how awards and prizes generate a variety of outcomes is welcome.

Introduction

In a society or an economy that honors egalitarian norms and democratic principles (Dworkin, 1981), and yet seeks to incentivize agents to act in ways consistent with meritocratic ideals and an enterprising ethos oftentimes introduce formal mechanisms that sift out extraordinary efforts and contributions from the average and the mediocre (Friedman and Reeves, 2020; Rivera, 2015; Roach and Sauermann, 2010; Stevens, 2009). What Collins (1979) refer to as the credential society emphasizes formal professional documents such as university diplomas, but also includes the use of a variety of commensuration devices and tools such as league tables, rankings, ratings, awards, prizes, honorary mentions, etc. (Bermiss et al., 2014; Espeland and Sauder, 2007; Kornberger and Carter, 2010) that serve to establish legitimate and widely recognized and authoritative devices that confer credibility and status to individuals or teams that have performed extraordinarily well according to predefined standards. Credential systems are therefore simultaneously based on egalitarian ideals (e.g. all contestants may be included in the commensuration process) and meritocratic valuations (e.g. winners are clearly on display for the benefit of audiences). Of the various credential system devices used in day-to-day work, awards and prizes are particularly vexing inasmuch such accolades do not appear ex nihilo, but are the product of a dense and thickly nested institutional environment wherein the giver of the prize or award of necessity wants to play an active role to practically define quality in stipulative terms, and how it is to be evaluated and/or measured (English, 2005). Consequently, awards and prizes are in many cases controversial and leading to disputes (say, in the cases whether US Secretary of Defense Henry Kissinger should be honored with the Nobel Peace Prize, or whether Bob Dylan’s lyrics qualified for a Nobel Prize in literature). Furthermore, it may be that even persons who themselves receive prizes are skeptical regarding such accolades. The renowned Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard’s essay “My Prizes” reveals Bernhard’s concerns, expressed in quite strong emotional terms: “I despised the people who were giving the prizes but I didn’t strictly refuse the prizes themselves. It was offensive, but I found myself the most offensive of all. I hated ceremonies but I took part in them, I hated the prize-givers but I took their money” (Bernhard, 2010: 390).

Allen and Parsons (2006: 808) use the term “consecration” (originally being a theological term) to denote any “[a]ttempt by a group or organization to impose a durable symbolic distinction between these objects and individuals worthy of veneration as exemplars of excellence within a field of cultural production and those that are not.” As status positions are oftentimes fragile (Gill, 2015; Sherman, 2018), and open to external influence or manipulation (e.g. Hahl et al., 2017), not the least in an otherwise egalitarian and liberal society wherein status positions tend to be earned rather than inherited, awards and prizes may play a non-proportional role when status hierarchies are established. Such symbolic distinctions between the ordinary and the extraordinary play a central role in how the credential society operates, and in many cases, past accomplishments linger on for a considerable period of time. Furthermore, in many cases, the metric used to calculate or assess extraordinary accomplishments are oftentimes disputed: the so-called global and competing university ranking systems ARWU (Academic Ranking of World Universities) and THES (Times Higher Education Supplement) grant different weight to prices and awards (most notably Nobel Prizes and Field Medals in mathematics); while ARWU grants 10% of their rating to Nobel Prizes and Field Medals, THES does not (Saisana et al., 2011: 165). As third parties, including future students, agencies, policy makers, the wider public, etc., have an interest in monitoring the performance, quality assurance, and the governance and accountability of universities, the ARWU and THES university rankings still provide bona fide performance benchmarks that also uninformed actors believe they can understand, refer to, and make use of.

In an actor network theory perspective, in social organizations, authority and agency are not granted to the individual, nor a professional community only on basis of a formal and hierarchical position in an organization. Instead, authority and agency is constituted in and through the horizontal network of resources being mobilized with the intention to generate such benefits for the actor (Bourgoin et al., 2020). Authority and the agency it is supportive of are thus assisted by what actor network theory scholars refer to as actants (Callon, 1995), non-human entities that serve to connect actors and objects in ways that are conducive of a variety of agencies. The role of actants are particularly pronounced in a social organization characterized by what Perrow (1986) refers to as unobtrusive control, control that is understated, indirect, secondary, or even vague or barely noticeable in day-to-day activities. This non-hierarchical and dynamic view of authority based on unobtrusive control, made stable and predictable by the introduction of specific actants, is supportive of an analysis of the role of awards and prizes in organizational fields, in professional communities, and inside organizations. Rather than being accepted as a prima facie evidence of an extraordinary accomplishment on basis of what for example, award-giving organizations claim regarding the purpose and intentions with the award or prize, an actor network theory perspective underlines how awards serve as a device that generate considerable effects under specific conditions. Awards, in the role of an actant, confer authority, and, by implication, generate agency not only supporting award-winning individuals or communities, but also a fortiori grant the authority to define and enforce quality criteria to the award-giving organization, which expands its agential capacities, not the least in claiming the jurisdictional authority to define quality in a specific market niche.

In this view, it is noteworthy that awards and prizes carry considerable potential for unobtrusive control capacities as individuals, work teams, departments, or even companies and industries may act in accordance with prescribed rules and objectives if they are either given an award or a prize, or if they intend to compete to win an award or a prize. What is here referred to as ex ante awards, awards that are given prior to the full completion of stipulated project plans, have been increasingly popular to introduce. Khan (2015: 632) argues that both academics and American policy makers are “increasingly enthusiastic about prizes,” and that the US government has instituted prizes “as a means of generating new ideas and products, claiming that prizes ‘have a good track record of spurring innovation’” (Khan, 2015: 633). Moser and Nicholas (2013: 785) examine the prizes given at the 1851 London Exhibition, and find that the “[a]ward of a prize was followed by a 40 per cent increase in patenting for prize-winning technologies.” A number of corporations have offered large privately funded prizes to incentivize market actors to target specific challenges and to generate innovations that handle general social and economic problems. Moser and Nicholas (2013: 764) also show that ex ante awards and prizes may spur innovation work, even in the case when the award does not include any monetary compensation or additional funding. The positive associations between prizes and patenting and innovation activities, Moser and Nicholas (2013) argue, is that the public attention given to new industrial ideas serves to connect entrepreneurs and innovators and finance capital investors.

This article examines two cases wherein urban development project plans have been granted formal awards prior to the completion of the stipulated projects. In the first case, the project plan for a residential city district close to the waterfront in a major Swedish city, the underlying project was given an award but was unfortunately never completed, primarily for political and financial reasons. The second project, a project including new housing units and retail and cultural activity facilities in a central city district, was similarly given an award prior to the construction work phase, but it is yet unclear whether the project plans will be realized, not the least in the shadow of an unpredictable and potentially faltering COVID-19 economy. Nevertheless, what is intriguing from a management studies and urban studies perspectives is that ex ante awards are used as an unobtrusive control device to accomplish specific goals, and to seal certain commitments among the heterogeneous actors that are commonly involved in large-scale urban development projects. In the conventional semantic meaning of the term an award or a prize, a certain accomplishment is being honored ex post to show and signal gratitude or respect for the efforts made and the work done. If the causality is reversed so that an award or prize is granted prior to such accomplishments, the everyday use of terms such as award or prize is arguably modified as there is no proper referent (see e.g. Kripke, 1972: 193) with which the award is associated. Awards and prizes no longer denote a formal recognition of an accomplishment after the fact, but merely impose certain expectations on the recipient. Alternatively, it is the formal project plan per se that is being honored, but that would be unreasonable, being similar to letting the prestigious chef contest Bocuse d’Or be determined on basis of written recipes submitted to the prize committee and its referees only, rather than on basis of the actual cooking performances of the contestants. That is, a description of an intended performance would be awarded, rather than the performance itself.

The remainder of the article is structured accordingly: First, a theoretical framework is presented. First, the actor network theory perspective is introduced, serving to portray awards and prizes as actants, devices that are supportive of agency on basis of its location in the actor network being mobilized. Second, the scholarly literature on the social significance of awards and prizes is reviewed. This literature show that awards generate both intended and unanticipated consequences that affect a variety of actors in a specific organizational field. The third section presents the study design and its methodology. In the sections following, the empirical material is presented. In the final sections of the article, theoretical contributions are discussed, and some implications for policy makers and managers are addressed.

Awards and prizes in as control devices in actor-networks

Contemporary democratic and liberal societies actively encourage social norms that are supportive of egalitarian, democratic, and liberal beliefs, including equality before the law, the dignity of all human beings, and the right to own property (Dworkin, 1981). At the same time, democratic and liberal societies need to establish incentives that are supportive of ambition, self-discipline, hard work, and a long-term commitment to skill and expertise development (Yue et al., 2013). In an ideal situation, each and every person can freely develop his or her skills and talents in the pursuit of happiness and an optimal individual performance. In actual situations, everyday life is replete with social mechanisms and practices (e.g. rules, routines, social norms, performance assessments) that control and incentivize the individual to act in ways that are conductive of individual and collective welfare (e.g. Maclean et al., 2014). To incentivize individuals to perform at the peak of their capacity, at the same time as the social order is preserved on basis of the legitimacy of egalitarian norms, concepts such as control and authority, and the day-to-day practices these concepts denote, need to co-exists with mechanisms and devices supportive of individual performances. In the following, the authority and control will be examined from an actor network perspective, and thereafter awards and prizes are introduced as specific devices—actants in the actor network theory parlance—that serves to promote extraordinary accomplishments.

The role of authority and unobtrusive control in organizations

The management studies literature is traditionally preoccupied with the question of control, a term that is central to both Taylorism and Weberian bureaucracy theory, and ever since forking into a multitude of conceptual paths and accompanying empirical studies. It is beyond the scope of this article to review the management control literature, but it may be noticed that managers control the inside of their organizations through a variety of coordination activities, at the same time as they themselves are subject to external control by for example, market actors (e.g. finance traders), regulatory agencies, suppliers, clients, etc. (see e.g. Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978). When control is wielded inside the organization, the long-term tendency has been gradually abandon direct inspection and similar forms of immediate control, and to increasingly promote control that is norm-based, identity-driven, indirect, and understated (e.g. Sewell, 2005). Perrow (1986: 129) introduces the concept of unobtrusive control to denote “[t]he control of the cognitive premises underlying action.” This type of managerial control is indirect, preferably barely noticed, and yet provides joint direction for example, heterogeneous groups. Unobtrusive control is thus a broad-spanning term, and more recent studies have emphasized how for example, algorithms and what Yeung (2017) refers to as “hypernudges”—Big Data-based nudges used in for example, social media—shape social and organizational behavior in an unobtrusive manner. Unobtrusive control is oftentimes control that is barely noticed in such terms, for instance, in the case of high-commitment employees who “love their work” to the point where they may no longer notice how their work-life balance is tilted in the favor of the former, thus risking to hollow out family relations and the time committed to other interests and responsibilities (Blagoev and Schreyögg, 2019; Hochschild, 1997; Perlow, 1999). Perrow (1986) does not introduce the term unobtrusive control to describe some kind of insidious manipulation of employees, but intends to provide a value-neutral analytical term being supportive of mutually rewarding and productive work, yet open to critical reflection.

When operating in a regime characterized by forms of unobtrusive control, the individual, work team, or professional community are incentivized to preserve jurisdictional authority to escape forms of control. Authority is a key term in the management studies literature. Max Weber spoke about Herrschaft as a traditional form of authority, as in the case of the medieval lord’s Herrschaft over the serf. More recently, authority has been gradually reinterpreted to denote influence and legitimacy in a more egalitarian social and organizational setting, that is, authority is here understood a performance, and/or a claim to expertise in a social setting wherein few formal positions or credentials are sufficient conditions for conferring such privileges to the individual (Bourgoin et al., 2020). Actor-network theory regards authority not so much as a resources or capacity once and for all bestowed upon an individual or a professional community on basis of position or credentials. Authority is not a stock of resources, already available in an organization and being hierarchically distributed from the apex of the social organization to its lower levels as prescribed by certain standards or rules. Instead, authority is generated on basis of the capacity to enroll and mobilize a variety of resources that act to render the individual or professional community authoritative, that is, as being trustworthy, qualified, and so forth. In this view, authority is constituted horizontally, in and through the networks of actors and actants being included. In this view of authority, agency, the capacity to act, “[c]an be attributed to heterogeneous and unexpected entities which are not necessarily human beings,” Callon (2008: 34) proposes. Furthermore, actants are objects, abstract resources (say, laws and regulations), or any other entity that enables action; an actant “[r]efer to any entity with the ability to act,” Callon (1995: 53) says.

To better explain the shift in focus from a hierarchical distribution to the horizontal constitution of authority, the actor-network theory view of a material object such as a new technology is an illustrative case. Whereas the conventional view is that a technology is premised on its own internal organization of components and its instrumental functionality, being understood as a brute fact, the actor-network theory view emphasizes that all technologies, and new technologies in particular, are always constituted in and through the communities that use, advocate, and otherwise support the technology (Latour, 1996; Sage et al., 2020). In this view, technologies are “[a]lignments of material and discursive practice” (Suchman et al., 2002: 164); technologies are what render society “durable,” in Latour’s (1991) formulation. When for example new technology is developed or technological objects are completed, what Suchman (2005) refers to as affiliative objects, including for example, prototypes (Suchman et al., 2002), play an active role in gradually stabilizing the qualities of the new technology. In the end, new technology is never self-enclosed, nor separated from human interest; technology is instead gradually stabilized on basis of its position and role in an actor network. On the other hand, human agency is constituted on basis of the capacity to engage for example, new technology, which makes agency a capacity that crosses the conventional epistemic boundary between humans and non-humans.

Bourgoin et al. (2020: 1136), who present an actor network theory view of authority, distinguish between credibility and authority, wherein the former term is “[p]rincipally conceptualized as emanating from an actor’s perceived believability and trustworthiness.” Authority is in turn conceptualized as “[t]he practical enactment of relations between individuals, and between those individuals and elements of their environment” (Bourgoin et al., 2020: 1137). The difference is that credibility is for most part determined by perceived individual qualities and track records, whereas authority is a matter of mobilizing and orchestrating a variety of resources and performances so that the actor appear to be authoritative in the eyes of interlocutors and audiences; credibility is “less transactional than authority,” Bourgoin et al. (2020: 1136) propose. The “performative understanding of authority” that Bourgoin et al. (2020: 1136) advocate underlines the role of artifacts and heuristics in the work to establish an authoritative position in a social context. “[P]eople may become authoritative by making ‘figures’ (i.e. ideas, documents, methods, etc.) present in their interactions, thus giving additional weight to their own actions,” Bourgoin et al. (2020: 1138) say.

While the traditional view of authority in the form of Herrschaft, the first actor instructs the second actor how to behave as the relation is essentially structured in a bilateral manner; in the contemporary period, authority is mostly dependent on “a third”—say, a document, a data set, a heuristic (say, Tobin’s Q, a price-per-earnings ratio, some spreadsheet with recent market data), and so forth—being introduced and agreed upon. “Authority,” Bourgoin et al. (2020: 1138) write, “is less about one person telling another what to do than about their agreement to take instructions from a third: the organization that they constitute by producing authoritative texts.” In this actor network theory view, control, preferably in the form of unobtrusive control, controlled barely noticed by social actors, is executed on basis of authority. Authority, in turn, is not granted solely on basis of formal positions or documented track records, but co-produced with objects and entities that confer authority to their spokesperson, Bourgoin et al. (2020) contend. This means that the ability to introduce a new entity with the capacity to confer authority to specific groups in an actor network is a means to execute unobtrusive control. In the following, awards and prizes are examined as entities that provide such benefits.

Awards and prizes as actants

While tensions between social norms that prescribe a meritocratic or an egalitarian allocation of resources should not be overstated, awards and prizes may be regarded as devices premised on meritocratic norms and an individualist credo in a culture that otherwise is supportive of collaborations and joint commitments. Taken these social tensions aside, awards and prizes are significant social facts as they, similar to many other social devices, including currency in the form of money (see Carruthers and Babb, 1996: 1556), operates best when not being subject to too much reflection. Organizations that give awards and prizes are preferably understood in infrastructural terms, that is, are not to be thought about or reflected upon at all, but for most part being taken for granted as fully legitimate award-givers, thus being a bona fide case of what Dobbin and Sutton (1998: 472) refer to as “collective amnesia”—a forgetfulness regarding infrastructural conditions. This ideal condition, from the point of view of award-giving organizations, is at times disrupted by critical commentators, as in the case of the sizeable literature demonstrating that women, all things equal, are less likely to receive awards and prizes, thus being an indication of selection bias that risk to erode the meritocratic halo of for example, scientific prizes (Lincoln et al., 2012; Ma et al., 2019). Nevertheless, despite such grievances, the growth of awards and prizes being introduced—which have been significant over the last two decades (Ma et al., 2019: 288)—is itself a socially significant social phenomenon that deserves scholarly attention.

Khan (2015: 634) says that the scholarly literature conventionally distinguishes between (1) ex ante inducement awards, (2) ex post prizes, such as rewards to “the winners of competitions,” (3) targeted prizes, which relate to “a specific and well-defined problem,” and the residual category of (4) prizes for “nonspecific achievements,” for example, lifetime-career awards in the film industry. Gallus and Frey (2017: 78), who examine the uses of awards inside of organizations, distinguish between confirmatory awards, which have “clearly defined performance criteria” (e.g. points earned in a sales competition) “upon which receipt of the award is made conditional,” and discretionary awards, which denotes awards that “[g]ive the manager more freedom to decide when and upon whom they are bestowed.” A primary function of awards and prizes is to signal recognition of achievements or accomplishment to audiences, and to publically celebrate the recipient (Gallus and Frey, 2017: 76), and in many cases awards and prizes that do not include notable material benefits can be highly valued (for instance, the most prestigious of the “big six” literature prizes in France, le prix Goncourt, bestow the winner with the modest sum of 10 euros, but is nonetheless associated with considerable status and, by implication, economic returns).

English (2005: 51) speaks about “the age of prizes” and the “prize frenzy” in the contemporary period, and proposes that the latent function of such accolades is that they “[b]ring disparate players into informed contact with one another so that mutual beneficial transactions may (in theory) take place among them.” This means that it is not only the prize-winner that benefits, but also the prize-giving organization can position itself as an actor assuming the authority to define what quality is, and how it is to be evaluated and/or measured. “Institutionally,” English (2005: 51) writes, “the prize functions as a claim to authority and an assertion of that authority—the authority, at the bottom, to produce cultural value.” The growing appetite over the last period for credentialing and consecrating via awards and prizes should therefore be treated as an effort to “monopolized the production and distribution of symbolic capital,” English (2005: 76) writes. For instance, the case of the Bank of Sweden’s prize in the economic sciences in the memory of Alfred Nobel, the underlying economic theory is oftentimes disputed both in terms of substance and its political implications, and specific theories associated with well-known Nobel laureates may be associated with different positions on the political spectrum (Offer and Söderberg, 2016). This in turn makes the committees’ choice a politicized statement in the eyes of informed audiences; for lay audiences, though, the political implications of the theories being awarded may go largely unnoticed. As awards, and new awards in particular, compete over media coverage and public attention, the ambition to monopolize symbolic capital may not be a major concern itself, but must still be understood in such terms, that is, as a stratagem to acquire a position wherein quality can be legitimately and authoritatively defined. Prize-giving organizations thus become visible (e.g. Zyglidopoulos and Fleming, 2011) at the same time as they introduce what Suchman (2005) refers to as “affiliative objects” (see also Duff and Sumartojo, 2017) that serve to vindicate the authority and status of the organization giving the prize, and/or the underlying professional community whose interests the organization represents. In this view, awards and prizes have several auxiliary benefits that includes providing professional communities with devices that may “shape the future” (Berg Johansen and De Cock, 2018) and to reduce status anxiety among professional communities who believe they are losing the authority, or the privilege to define quality in substantive terms (Gill, 2015).

Award effects in actor networks: Second and third-order inferences, and negative status spillover effects

An award or a prize express certain social norms and beliefs regarding performance and quality, and such accolades consequently may affect how audiences appreciate the work of the prize winner. Correll et al. (2017: 299) speak about what they call second and third-order inferences in the case wherein for example, consumers choose to buy, say, a book because a significant other, or some generalized third other have expressed the belief that the book is worth being read, despite the fact that the consumer may not share that belief privately. That is, if people act in ways consistent with the opinions of others under certain conditions, awards and prizes may serve a key role in tipping for example, consumer choices in one direction or the other. Fortunately, such sociological propositions lends themselves to empirical testing. Correll et al. (2017: 320) refer to a study of the book market that shows that the “sales gap” differential between prize-winning books and short-listed books is greater in the December holiday season than during the rest of the year. This is presumably the case because this is the period of the year when individuals are “more likely to be purchasing books as a gift for friends and family rather than for themselves” (Correll et al., 2017: 320). This means that prize-winning books gain the upper hand over other books, and despite not of necessity being regarded as being qualitatively inferior, non-winning books generate less sales than prize-winning books do. The wider concern is that second and third-order inferences, resulting in a benefit for the prize-winner, may violate the social norm of meritocracy, Correll et al. (2017) propose; prize-winning books may not be qualitatively superior, and yet they sell more simply because they were selected to win a prize. In its consequences, by adhering to what others say or believe, book buyers impose penalties on non-winning books, and ipso facto undermine meritocratic norms.

Such findings can be empirically verified through studies of scientific citations. Reschke et al. (2018: 820) are concerned with the erosion of meritocratic principles when awards and prizes are introduced. Such an event it referred to as a status shock, being a situation wherein one scholar’s work is consecrated through an award, and is increasingly cited accordingly. Based on a complex study design, Reschke et al. (2018: 842) demonstrate that scholars who receive an award posthumously get statistically significantly more citations than they did prior to the announcement of the award, but they also found robust evidence that indicates that other scholars in the same field received fewer citations after the event. This means that the award generates a zero-sum game situation wherein the one scholar’s consecration and increased citation rate result in other scholars active in the field receiving comparably less recognition in the form of citations. Reschke et al. (2018: 842) refer to this phenomenon as “negative status spillover effects.” In other words, awards and prizes are devices of recognition that generate lasting social effects in the field.

From a management studies perspective, these unanticipated consequences of awards and prizes are of interest because award and prizes may confer authority to individuals, teams, and organizations so that their work can be conducted more effectively. To better understand how awards and prizes are supportive of accomplishing for example, project goals (as in the urban development cases examined in this article), three analytical terms are introduced: unobtrusive control, authority, and actants. Furthermore, what Khan (2015: 634) refers to as ex ante inducement awards (and here being referred to ex ante rewards) is of particular interest as the meritocratic component of for example, ex post awards, wherein actual accomplishments, oftentimes on basis of selection criteria formally announced, is understated. Expressed in terms of linguistics, ex ante awards do not (yet) have a proper referent, which means that what is de facto awarded are ideas, projected outcomes, and creative and innovative thinking, not actual, materialized projects. Ex ante awards are therefore to a higher extent in comparison to ex post awards contingent on the legitimacy and the authority of the award-granting institution, as in the case of the government agency or the private corporation granting awards to innovative ideas.

A note on methodology and study design

Two urban development project awards

In the following, two cases of ex ante awards will be examined. In the first case, a residential area planned to be built on an old industrial district area was given an award for the “best urban development plan.” Unfortunately, regardless of this accolade, the financial uncertainty and the lack of political unity regarding the use of the centrally located “brownfield site” undermined the project plans, which left the project dead in the water. In the second case, an ex ante award was given to a residential area project close to an attractive river walk location, previously being part of the now defunct harbor transportation area, but also being within walking distance to older city neighborhoods. In both cases, intense, cross-organizational, and costly urban planning activities organized by the city administration in collaboration with private industry (e.g. real estate companies and construction companies) were part of the urban development work, and the winning of awards were naturally perceived by participants as a form of recognition and appreciation of joint efforts. As will be argued, the manifest function (Merton, 1957) of these awards are the recognition of the social and economic value of urban development activities, but the latent function of the awards is to act as a unobtrusive control device that is supportive of the authority of the urban development project organization. Consistent with the work of Bourgoin et al. (2020), authority does not simply emerge when making declarations regarding jurisdictional discretion, or formal right to execute decisions, but is contingent on the capacity to mobilize a variety of resources that position the agent in a network of relations that jointly secure the authority of the agent. In this actor network model, awards and prizes are devices that confer authority to agents and provide closure to disputes that otherwise would have been regarded as ongoing.

Data collection and analysis

The two urban development projects that were granted ex ante awards examined in this article was part of a longitudinal study in a Swedish metropolitan area. The aim of the longitudinal study was to over time follow the implementation of a major urban renewal project, wherein the former harbor district, relocating to the seaside outside of the city center, was transformed into residential areas. In this urban renewal project, there were high sustainability ambitions and to create innovative solutions to old problems. The longitudinal study that began in 2014 and are continuing through 2020, included a considerable number of interviews, project meeting observations, and informal conversation with a variety of project co-workers. In total 48 interviews were conducted, and circa 350 hours of project-meeting observations were made. In interviews and at project meetings, the projects that received awards were discussed in detail, both before and after the awards were received. This gives a good overview and background of the projects and on what ground they received the awards. Interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim and coded as prescribed by scholarly standards, and field notes were written in a consistent manner throughout the period.

According to Swedish urban development project standards, the two projects included municipality agency representatives, private real estate and construction companies, in-housed project leaders and directors, and public relations experts and similar professional groups communicating with stakeholders outside of the project team. The sheer size of the urban development project, the magnitude of the investments needed, and the political coalitions demanded to be fully supportive of the stipulated plans make the entire project activities almost impenetrable for an outsider. Consequently, the various project activities which included the building of new bridges and tunnels over and under a river, the creation of new residential areas, and not the least the re-structuring of the traffic flow in the city center during the entire period can be summarized as being what has been called a “mega-project” in the project management literature. To practically cope with all these discrete but interrelated project activities, the urban development program was structured into seven geographically discrete areas, each being a project that included considerable civil engineering, project coordination, financing, and political considerations.

The ex ante awards examined in this paper are thus introduced in an urban development context that is replete with practical, legal, and political concerns and debates. The information regarding the ex ante awards granted to the two sub-projects were not anticipated in the study design, but were emerging events of the kind that ethnographic research methods are calling attention to: significant events that introduce new information or change conditions, and therefore being worthy of the researcher’s attention as such events carries socially significant information for project co-workers (Andersson and Cook, 2019). Regarding the awards, some of the interview materials include discussions regarding these accolades, but the primary source for additional information has been Internet homepages wherein award-granting organizations have made their announcements, or in news media commenting on the awards.

Ex ante awards in urban development contexts

In the following, the two urban development projects being given awards will be referred to as the “Brownfield Residential District Project” and the “South River Residential District Project.” These two urban development projects have many qualities in common as they are large scale projects that carries significant symbolic value, and being associated with political prestige as cross-partisan coalitions have a joint interest in renewing centrally located and attractive land to promote the city as a dynamic business center and a livable city, accessible for all kinds of families and individuals. In both cases, it was urban development project plans that were awarded, that is, in both cases ex ante awards served to confer prestige to actors involved in materializing stipulated plans.

Case 1: Brownfield Residential District Project award

On November 29, 2016, the Swedish Architects’ trade union declared on its homepage that the Brownfield Residential District Project has received the annual “Plan Prize” that the organization has issued every year since 1992. In their statement, the prize jury emphasized that the Brownfield Residential District Project aimed to transform a former industrial site, previously being a location where shipping, wharf business activities, and other heavy industry activities had dominated, into a residential area, now for the first being accessible for a broader public. “In the [project], the city has actively developed new ways to invite citizens, companies, and municipality organization to jointly collaborate around the question on how to develop a more socially and ecologically sustainable city.” The jury concludes by stating that the Brownfield Residential District Project is an “inspiring role model” for any project with this level of ambition. The jury’s chairman was cited in the news reporting, saying that a “dialog” with the citizens and local residents is today a key component in urban development activities, and that the Brownfield Residential District Project had honored this ambition to include citizens and local residents in the project work activities.

The Plan Prize was transferred to a new architect trade union organization founded in 2002, and the Swedish Architects organization today acts as the foremost trade union supporting architects and landscape designers’ professional interests. The Swedish Architects organization includes circa 90% of all architects with a formal architect degree, which translates into 13,000 members, whereof 2600 are student members. In addition, the Swedish Architects organization is involved in debating issues concerning the built environment at large, and are supportive of variety of campaigns and activities in the domain of urban development. The Swedish Architects organization declares that it actively promotes architect in a “broad and leading” role in a variety of planning and building activities in the industry. Furthermore, in normative terms, the Swedish Architects organization states that “qualified architecture” must recognize “the needs of the users,” today and in the future, which indicates that the organization assumes broader social responsibilities than to merely secure and promote the members’ interests. Unfortunately, the project study indicates that on a practical level, it is difficult to engage local residents in so-called citizen’s dialogs, and these challenges are accentuated in the case where there are no current residents in the city district being planned. When seen in this terms, the Plan Prize is a device for a professional organization to accomplish a variety of goals: to gain media coverage in a world characterized by considerable competition over the public’s and policy makers’ attention, to create a role for itself as a qualified actor hosting the competence, skills, and experience to value and assess new built environment projects and initiatives, and, more indirectly, to promote members’ interests in emphasizing the key role of major urban development projects in economic growth policies.

Even if the Brownfield Residential District Project plan failed to materialize, the postponed project was given an additional award in 2018, a prize given by the Swedish Landscape Designers’ trade union. More specifically, it was one of the parks planned within the Brownfield Residential District Project that was granted the prize. The so-called Jubilee Park, celebrating the forthcoming quadricentennial city jubilee, was planned to include a variety of recreational resources, whereof some were early on constructed as part of a temporary park design, including a playground, a sauna and, during the summer season, a roller derby rink, a sailing school for children, and a café. Others were planned to be constructed at a later stage, including one saltwater and one freshwater pool. The prize awarded was established in 1987 (landscape designers are today paying members of the Swedish Architects union, but the prize remains a responsibility of the landscape designer member section) and serves the purpose to “promote a qualified outdoor environment”—an ambition that is consistent with the professional interest of the landscape designers. A municipality agency representative expressed her gratitude vis-à-vis the prize jury, and emphasized the need for including citizens and local residents in the development work to be able to generate desirable outcomes. “You cannot develop a certain location solely on basis of pen and papers,” she said: “You needs to have hands and hearts on the ground as well.” Similar to the Plan Prize awarded to the Brownfield Residential District Project, a professional organization actively contributes to urban development activities by highlighting projects (yet to be materialized) that the jury members regard as being commendable. Unfortunately, both prizes awarded by the professional architect union underrated the risk of the project plans not being completed on basis of a variety of conditions, including shifting political preferences and priorities, the difficulty involved in estimating urban development project costs, under other contingencies emerging from the shadow of the future.

Case 2: The South River Residential District Project award

On November 11, 2020, the Sweden Green Building Council, a non-governmental organization, announced a series of prizes in different categories, jointly labeled Sweden Green Building Awards. Sweden Green Building Council had recently developed and launched a certification tool, named Citylab, supportive of “sustainable urban development projects.” The Citylab tool includes four classes of certifications, covering the development, production, and facilities management phases of sustainable urban development projects, and provides access to expertise in sustainable urban development activities through for example, web-based seminars. To honor the Citylab tool that aim to provide a new standard for sustainable urban development projects, the 2020 Sweden Green Building Awards included a specific “Citylab project” prize. South River Residential District Project, a major residential area project including the production of 1300 housing units, two parks, kindergarten facilities, one hotel, and an estimated 5000–6000 new workplace spaces, won the first Citylab project prize on basis of, the prize jury declares, “a unique inclusive collaborative urban development project model, including a focus on social sustainability innovations” (author’s translation from Swedish). The jury also declared that the South River Residential District Project would serve to “influence” other local or national urban development projects on basis of the broad engagement of a variety of actors and organizations actively participating. A municipality agency representative, being part of the project team, expressed his gratitude and stated that the project team now “get more energy that can help us take our ambitions all the way.” Furthermore, the municipality agency representative said that he regarded the prize as an evidence of the appreciation regarding “all the hard work we have jointly invested in the project”; “Now, we can see the result,” he added. It should be noted here that the term “result” denotes not so much an actual production of urban and physical spaces as it is represent a valuation of the formal planning work conducted by the cross-organizational project team. To better understand why prizes given on basis of project plans, the broader institutional framework needs to be examined in more detail.

The Sweden Green Building Council (SGBC), the award-giver and the key actor is presenting itself as “Sweden’s leading member organization for sustainable social building.” SGBC was founded in June 2009 by 13 member organizations, including for example, the City of Stockholm and a major bank, in addition to real estate and construction companies, and a number of companies representing other sectors of the real estate and construction industries. Currently, SGBC lists 400 member organizations that “represent the broad spectrum” of the “social building sector”—a condition that the SGBC refers to as “one of [our] foremost strengths” (Sweden Green Building Council, 2020). Since October 2011, SGBC is also member of the transnational organization World Green Building Council, which includes more than 90 national councils, today acting as one of the world’s largest organizations in the field of built environment sustainability. SGBC provides certification services, education and training, and actively participate in public debates and discussion regarding issues that “are beneficial for both humans and the environment” (Sweden Green Building Council, 2020). Taken together, Sweden Green Building Council serves as a platform organization for a broad spectrum of organizations and individuals committed to a sustainable built environment.

SGBC also recognizes its political role inasmuch as it explicitly states that the organization actively “promotes legal reforms that favour green construction work” (Sweden Green Building Council, 2020). Taken together, SGBC and its Citylab certification and project management system and play an active role in promoting sustainable urban development projects. SGBC actively participates in promoting sustainable urban development practices, and therefore serve as norm entrepreneur (Sunstein, 1996: 2030) on behalf of the interest of member organization and, allegedly, a broader number of stakeholders, whereof some are potentially not already fully cognizant of the need to build a more sustainable urban milieu. By introducing a specific Citylab-prize as part of a number of different Sweden Green Building Awards, SGBC promotes itself as a legitimate market maker, call attention the new Citylab certification and project management tool, and actively participate in defining what a sustainable urban development project “on the ground” would look like on basis of the standards and rules that SGBC and World Green Building Council endorse and actively promote. For the project co-workers, the award given was both treated as a bona fide evidence of certain urban development qualities being developed, at the same time, one interviewee argued, as there were some efforts made to make the project plan include and comply with Citylab components. In the former case, the award was accepted as an authoritative and trustworthy indication of the project conforming with urban development project standards enforced by various stakeholders and agencies: “Awards have been given as there are considerable urban development project qualities,” project co-worker (#1) said. In the latter case, such standards and qualities were already prescribed by the Citylab model, and the project team made some adjustments in the project documents to make them more consistent with the Citylab instructions: “Documents were tweaked to fit into the Citylab framework” (project co-worker #2). In these accounts, the Citylab-prize was actively involved in formulating the project plan (i.e. the award had performative qualities and served as an actant in an actor network), at the same time as it was treated as indicative of the specific project having certain qualities, presumably independent of what the award-giving organization had already stipulated as performance measure qualities. In the view, the award was both the cause and the effect of the project plan descriptions.

Despite all these outcomes, a theoretical explanation is still demanded to shed light on the question why SGBC and other award-giving organizations choose to issue ex ante awards when sustainability is a both a fairly loosely defined quality, and the project plans are yet to be completed, that is, the question regarding the actual (and not projected) sustainability qualities of the South River Residential District Project remains a question to be answered on basis of empirical data at some future point in time.

Discussion

In a world beset by contingencies of all sorts, and wherein authority is not solely granted to individuals or organizations on basis of formal credentials or hierarchical positions (Bourgoin et al., 2020), awards and prizes may play an active role in shaping how claims to jurisdictional discretion are negotiated and determined (Andersson and Cook, 2019), and how decision making rights are conferred to individuals or organizations that are certified in terms of being deemed to have made extraordinary accomplishments and contributions. In the role of an award-giving organization, the authority to make declarations regarding how to draw the line of demarcation between ordinary and extraordinary contributions, and to define quality in substantive and stipulative terms (“this is quality as we define it”) is claimed. In an actor network perspective, neither agency, nor authority can be assumed to pre-date organizational action. That is, agency or authority are not some stock to be distributed on basis of certain criteria. Instead, in the actor network theory perspective, humans in organizational settings always of necessity form coalitions including artifacts, technologies, and other resources, supportive of intended or stated objectives, and such coalitions of resources are constitutive of agency and authority, operationalized as the capacity to conduct decisions that result in action and material changes (Czarniawska, 2004). In this perspective, ex ante awards, examined in the two empirical cases, are actants, objects that serve to consecrate certain planned activities, which implies that authority is conferred from the giver of the award to the individual or the team who is held responsible for organizing the planned activities.

In the specific empirical cases, ex ante award-giving organizations act to provide closure in cases where urban development projects are for example, riddled by uncertainty, are associated with financial or political risks, are controversial in the eyes of stakeholders, or are otherwise disputed for a foreseeable future. Furthermore, ex ante awards become devices in market communication campaigns as major urban development project, which include considerable practical challenges, are assisted by formal declarations of excellence. In the two cases examined, ex ante awards are established within the core industry, organizing the urban development activities, which means that ex ante awards represent what can be called a form of “auto-recognition” or “self-consecration” strategy, wherein a sector of the economy introduce awards and prizes to signal to other actors what industry insiders regard as extraordinary contributions. When serving such roles, the legitimacy of awards and prizes are easily disputed, but regardless of such criticism and grievances regarding allegedly self-aggrandizing activities, such awards have social and economic consequences. However, as awards and prizes are commonly associated with positive and affirmative market communication and signaling (it is not coincidental that award and prizes are associated with festivities and glamor), awards and prizes nonetheless serves as a form of unobtrusive control that provide an at least temporal closure in cases that otherwise would potentially remain open for discussions, disputes, and re-evaluations.

This article makes a theoretical contribution in combining an actor network theory perspective and the scholarly awards and prizes literature. Actor networks are constitutive of agential capacities, and the sharp growth of awards being introduced would be difficult to explain unless awards played a more important role than they are formally declared to do by award-giving organizations. The actor network theory perspective recognizes the significance of seemingly peripheral material and non-human resources in the social organization, and actants such as awards are granted certain capacities that other analytical frameworks would arguably understate or overlook. Based on this analytical framework, a substantive critique of the expanded use of awards and prizes in the credential society can be formulated. The fast growth of the variety of awards and prizes in many domains of society and professional fields is arguably not primarily explained on basis of an upward shift in the public appetite for such accolades, but is better understood as the outcome from more sophisticated and newly forged actor networks, wherein certain actors benefit, either directly or indirectly, from the authority to define quality in stipulative terms. As a larger number of organizations assume an active role in granting awards and prizes, they themselves, and, secondly, the changing recipient of these accolades, benefit the most. Yet, it would be inadequate to claim that they are the only beneficiaries. In sectors of the economy or society where there is a shortage or lack of standards (with the arts and cultural production being the exemplary case), or with few shared benchmarks regarding performance assessment, award-granting organizations may actively support the establishment of shared standards that are supportive of net economic and social welfare effects (Khan, 2015; Moser and Nicholas, 2013). Furthermore, establishing benchmarks for what counts as extraordinary accomplishments and contributions may inspire for example, new market entrants or neophytes to act on basis of this information, hopefully resulting in further high-quality contributions. The negative side of the equation for award-giving organizations is that there is arguably a diminishing return on the nth award or prize (Gallus and Frey, 2017: 78) as awards and prizes themselves need to operate preferably in a monopolistic setting (say, as the Nobel Prize presumably do), or in an oligopolistic setting (as in the case of the “big six” French literature prizes) to factually serve as a widely shared and legitimate reference point for quality definition and verification. If a market or a market segment overflow with awards and prizes, based on complementing or even competing quality definitions or quality assessment methods, this may be cognitively overwhelming for audiences. In the vocabulary of actor network theory, as the number of awards grows, with a diminishing return on attention from intended audiences, the award qua actant can no longer preserve or prolong the authority of the award-giving organization as intended audiences are potentially no longer informed about the significance of the award. The actor network that includes a specific award thus become ineffective in conferring authority to both recipients and award-giving organizations. Consequently, the political economy of awards and prizes is a restricted domain, which means that already established award-granting organizations are incentivized to raise entry barriers to reduce competition.

As a practical matter, the choice of the award-giving organizations to institute an ex ante award (rather than some other form of reward) is a practice in search of a theoretical explanation. In the two empirical cases examined, awards were given to recipients on basis of plans rather than fully completed and materialized projects. Studies show that ex ante awards have been associated with material changes, including for example, increased patenting and new innovations (Moser and Nicholas, 2013), and one explanation for this choice is that ex ante awards were regarded as the most attractive option if project plans are easier to assess than finalized projects are, as they for example, do not demand empirical evidence regarding the actual sustainability of the buildings (see e.g. Giraudeau, 2018, and Kirsch et al., 2009, regarding venture capital investors’ assessment of business plans). In the actor network theory perspective, this means that agency is secured on basis of a choice based on a preference for efficient market communication and limited costs. A second explanation is that urban development projects are always dependent on favorable market conditions and the robustness of the political and economic coalitions forged between participating organizations (Clegg and Courpasson, 2004; Hoegl et al., 2004; Lenfle and Söderlund, 2019). In order to further stabilize a fragile social organization (see e.g. Knox et al., 2008; Suchman, 2000), ex ante awards may be introduced to raise the bar (i.e. the costs) for participants to quit at the stage where the project plan is already formally recognized and awarded by external and professional evaluators. In this view, which is consistent with the actor network theory perspective, an ex ante award serves as an unobtrusive control device that create social cohesion and stability in fragile coalitions. In brief, the award is supportive of ongoing commitments and activities despite a variety of contingencies and the uncertainty that looms. Unfortunately, in the case of the Brownfield Residential District Project, this stratagem did not help saving the project from being canceled (or postponed—for the time being, the future of the project remains unclear). A third explanation would be that award-granting organizations are not particularly concerned with project plan outcomes at all as they primarily introduce and give awards to promote their own interest (a proposition consistent with Bourgoin et al.’s, 2020, analytical framework), plausibly in combination with a pragmatic belief in late-stage project plans in most cases being materialized as the sunk cost and the risk of shaming and political controversies are considerable in later stages. In that case, the analytical distinction between ex ante and ex post awards is largely beside the point, as it is the award and its capacity to promote the award-giving organization itself that is the primary concern in these activities.

In the credential society, a milieu wherein social status and prestige is accomplished on basis of a combination of individual achievements, yet being anchored in an egalitarian credo and democratic principles, new awards and prizes are likely to continue to be introduced. Apparently, such accolades are in the service of particular interests, but from a critical perspective, awards are fluid and changeable epistemic entities whose qualities and effects are complicated to determine a priori. Awards are here associated with unobtrusive control (Perrow, 1986), forms of control and control devices that are introduced, seemingly self-contradictory, with the intention of being overlooked by social actors. Unobtrusive control may be beneficial for social welfare, but it remains an elusive concept precisely because it easily escapes critical reflection. Consequently, more scholarly work is called for to examine forms of unobtrusive control, for instance when it is executed through the introduction of awards and prizes. That is, awards are prizes are more than meets the eye (or, perhaps better, what is staged and communicated to meet the eye), as critical scholars emphasize. As English (2005: 51) noticed, “the prize functions as a claim to authority and an assertion of that authority.” Perhaps that is what Thomas Bernhard (2010) intuitively understood, that the awards and prizes he was given was not primarily about his own literary oeuvre—it was a form of unobtrusive control mechanism, tying Bernhard into a network of actors and actants mobilized with the ulterior motive to secure the authority and agency of an allegedly benevolent price-giving organization, in fact having larger ambition than to serve a merely ceremonial role.

Conclusion

This article weds actor network theory and the social science literature on awards and prizes to provide an analytical model that underlines that awards and prizes are fabricated and introduced to serve certain strategic and tactic objectives, yet, when circulating in social communities, they generate material and lasting effects. The sharp growth in awards and prizes given are indicative of a growing market or market niche interest in securing the authority to define quality and extraordinary accomplishments in descriptive and factual terms. In this context and from an actor network theory perspective, an award serves as an actant that are supportive of unobtrusive control within a domain where the award-giving organization, and the individual or organization receiving an award, make jurisdictional claims. Such an actor network and the unobtrusive control generated tends to be semi-stable, especially in the case of ex ante awards for at least two reasons. First, award-giving organizations operates under the predicament of diminishing marginal return on additional awards in a sector of society (indicating a tendency toward “award saturation”). Second, the case of for example, science awards, a notable underrepresentation of female award-winners (Lincoln et al., 2012; Ma et al., 2019) risk to undermine the authority of the award-granting organizations, or the professional community it represents. However, under regular conditions, awards operate as anticipated by its protagonists, and empirical studies show that for example, ex ante awards are associated with positive and lasting outcomes (Moser and Nicholas, 2013). To allude to a much-cited article by Bruno Latour (1991), award qua actants that certifies certain contribution as being substantive, at times even consecrating them—which is a key activity in the credential society—is what makes jurisdictional claims to authority durable. Awards are therefore epistemologically fragile, yet they are socially significant as they enable action and stabilize communities. That is, as being an actant, a quasi-object, or a third (Serres, 1982) that connects actors, ex ante awards play a substantial role in shaping and sustaining political coalitions, to inform and encourage decision makers, and to generate news media reporting and other forms of public attention. Further scholarly research should preferably further theorize, and empirically study the role of awards and prizes in highly nested institutional and market-based settings, not the least in urban development projects which are commonly associated with uncertainties of all sorts.