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Abstract

This thesis takes a cognitive perspective on entrepreneurship, specifically exploring the role of cognitive frames across its three constituent empirical studies. Study 1 examines the role of field-level growth frames in shaping what founders see and how they adapt as they attempt to grow their ventures. Study 2 explores how cognitive frames shape what founders learn and how they learn it within institutionalised support settings. Study 3 turns to the emergence of these frames, examining how founder characteristics can potentially shape the cognitive orientations founders bring to entrepreneurial situations. Each study utilises an independent dataset. Studies 1 and 2 employ a longitudinal qualitative approach, drawing on 90+ interviews across both studies. Study 3 utilises a large-scale database of entrepreneurs and employs fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to examine its findings.

The research reveals that cognitive frames are not merely perceptual filters but active organising structures with consequential effects throughout the entrepreneurial journey. Even when founders operate within identical programme provisions or face similar institutional environments, their frames produce markedly different patterns of action, adaptation, and learning. A particularly illuminating finding concerns how frames can become self-defeating. When a scaling (growth) frame forecloses the very adaptations needed to operate in relational and informal markets, the pursuit of growth paradoxically creates the conditions for failure.

These findings make three core contributions: to research on entrepreneurial cognition by theorising frames as field-inherited, processual, and consequential across multiple stages of the entrepreneurial journey; to research on entrepreneurial support by foregrounding the founder-side interpretive mechanism as a driver of heterogeneity in support outcomes; and to research on scaling by repositioning it as a cognitive phenomenon with boundary conditions shaped by market embeddedness. Additionally, this thesis opens a conversation about the configurational nature of founder cognition, identifying pre-entry characteristic combinations rather than individual attributes as the shapers of what founders think and how they act.

Publication Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HF Commerce
Departments:	Bayes Business School > Bayes Business School Doctoral Theses Bayes Business School > Faculty of Management Doctoral Theses

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