Högskolan i Skövde

Business developers navigating uncertainty at the initial stage of strategy engage in diagnostic processes. These processes have consequences for the macro strategic direction organisations take, yet the micro cognitive process by which this navigation occurs receives relatively little attention in existing entrepreneurial or organisational literature. This study addresses this gap by examining and comparing the initial diagnostic process of business developers operating in high-growth and stable business environments in Sweden. Using the Gioia methodology, ten semi-structured interviews were conducted with five written and the other five spoken. The participants were chosen through purposive sampling with participants of business developers active across technology, manufacturing, and business incubator service sectors. The findings reveal two coherent diagnostic logics: an enactive-relational logic characterising high-growth practitioners and a confirmatory-institutional logic characterising stable practitioners. These two logics represent fundamentally distinct cognitive logics produced by practitioners’ respective institutions. Building on this, the study contributes to a boundary condition argument: institutional theory and sensemaking theory are not uniformly complementary but conditionally applicable, with each theory's explanatory power over diagnostic cognition determined by the practitioner's orientation toward institutional context. The study further contributes a five-stage empirical model of the initial diagnostic process and finds that depending on the organisational orientation, each stage is encoded with a different logic system.