In 2002 James F. English wrote:

Since making this statement, many scholars, including English himself, have taken significant strides to develop an interdisciplinary field of scholarship which scrutinises the intricacies of the cultural prize in popular culture and examines the negotiations and exchanges of value central to prizes and awards. The existing scholarship has provided instrumental valuations of prize culture, providing critical frameworks by which to begin to understand the prize-giving phenomenon. Often central to this is the work of Pierre Bourdieu and his sociological approach to cultural production and spectacle. It is the application of his understandings of economic, social and cultural capital exchange that has, in particular, provided the most significant contribution to the scholarly field; this process has consolidated a framework by which researchers can attempt to quantify, or interrogate, the impact and influence of prizes upon culture.

As a result of this, when I began my research into the Saltire Society Literary Awards in October 2012, I believed I had a good sense of how I would approach the project, what knowledge I would need and how I might be able to explore the impact of the Society's Literary Awards. I began thus armed with scholarship on the workings of literary award culture in the United Kingdom and existing writing on awards like the Booker Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Costa Book Award. However, the more I delved into the Society's history, and the history of its literary awards and commendations, the more I realised that this knowledge, while providing a helpful context, could not necessarily be applied directly to the Society's Literary Awards. This was not just because it was a different award, with different motivations and criterion, but also because – as this study of the Saltire Society Literary Awards evidences – there is no one size fits all when it comes to literary awards.