Tournament Rituals, Category Dynamics, and Field Configuration: The Case of the Booker Prize

In this article we theorize the ways in which tournament rituals, in the form of prominent industry award ceremonies, configure organizational fields. We review field theory to distil four criteria to which field‐configuring mechanisms should conform. We undertake an archival study of the Booker Prize for Fiction to explore how this tournament ritual has configured the field of contemporary English‐language literature by championing the distinctive category of post‐colonial fiction.