The competitive behaviour of the VSE manager in the traditional services sector through the lens of cognitive psychology
Although it has long been accepted that in order to understand the competitive behaviour of a very small enterprise (VSE), it is necessary to look at its manager, the study of its cognitive sphere has made little use of the concepts forged in cognitive psychology, whose purpose is however to analyse the cognition of individuals. To fill this gap, we sought to discover what the information processing approach, dominant in cognitive psychology, could contribute to the understanding of the cognitive foundations of the competitive behaviour of the VSE manager. To this end, we interviewed twenty VSE managers in the traditional services sector about their way of imagining competition and dealing with it on a daily basis. The transcripts of the managers’ accounts were analysed on the basis of theoretical coding. This work revealed the central role of the reasoning of the managers of VSEs in the traditional services sector in their competitive behaviour. This research allowed us to construct a mechanism that reflects the manager’s implicit reasoning in competitive behaviour.