Entrepreneurial sense-making, sense-breaking and sense-demanding

Cognitive differences at the individual level may determine how entrepreneurs execute entrepreneurial tasks (Forbes, 2005). Extant studies have focused mainly on the consequences of entrepreneurs possessing and leveraging particular cognitive abilities (Grégoire et al., 2011). Meanwhile, the mere performance of entrepreneurial action has an effect on an entrepreneur’s cognition, whether it be decision-making under uncertainty, pattern recognition or prototype building (Baron and Ensley, 2006; McMullen and Shepherd, 2006; McKelvie et al., 2011), drawing attention to the cause of entrepreneurial cognitive development. This cause versus consequence focus is described as an enduring conundrum within the entrepreneurial cognition literature (Grégoire et al., 2011). To address this conundrum researchers have called for more attention to be paid to dynamic processes related to entrepreneurial cognition (Mitchell et al., 2011), such as the role of third parties as these affect the development of entrepreneurial cognition (Ozgen and Baron, 2007). Recognizant of the role of the social context in entrepreneurial cognition, Mitchell et al. (2011) conceptualized entrepreneurial cognition as socially situated. Socially situated cognition (SSC) sees cognition as action-orientated, embodied, situated and distributed. Socially situated cognition emphasizes the distributed nature of cognitive development, namely, other actors as sources of information and knowledge who can be leveraged in respect of that (Haynie et al., 2010; Dew et al., 2015).