Date: 27 April 2026, Monday
Time: 12.30 – 13.30
Place: MA-330
“Empowered but not Emancipated: Deferential Entrepreneurship under Coercion”
by
Jeffrey McMullen
Imperial College London
Abstract
How can organizational actors exercise entrepreneurial agency when they are embedded in coercive “total institutions” marked by tight rules, surveillance, and discretionary punishment? Building on institutional work, practice-driven institutionalism, micro-power, and emancipatory entrepreneurship, this essay develops a mechanism-based account of deferential entrepreneurship under coercion. Using stylized incidents from The Shawshank Redemption as a disciplined illustrative device—a “thought experiment with pictures”—the essay explains how dominated insiders introduce new practices without incurring punishment and why such efforts typically yield localized, revocable empowerment rather than emancipation. The mechanism specifies that an actor (i) identifies an authority’s pain point, (ii) frames a practice with professional legitimacy and deference cues, and (iii) offers value that exceeds perceived enforcement costs, thereby crossing an authority acceptance threshold and gaining conditional discretion.
The analysis distinguishes empowerment (granted, contingent autonomy) from emancipation (credibly protected negative freedom) and articulates a necessary institutional gate—external guarantees such as property rights, due process, and rule of law—without which empowerment collapses when interests diverge. Boundary conditions include the substitutability of the actor’s expertise, the visibility of the practice, procedural ambiguity, identity stigma, and authority rent-extraction incentives. Midrange implications follow: (1) conditional empowerment is most likely when authority value exceeds enforcement costs and expertise is hard to substitute; (2) diffusion and durability increase with low visibility and high procedural ambiguity; and (3) conversion to emancipation requires credible legal protections. The essay reframes embedded agency for coercive settings and sharpens practice-driven institutionalism by specifying a portable mechanism, scope conditions, and failure modes for entrepreneurial work in total institutions.
Bio
Jeffery S. McMullen, PhD, MBA, CPA, is a Professor of Entrepreneurship at Imperial Business School, best known for his thought leadership in developing much of the field’s current theoretical foundation and for setting its research trajectory over the last decade as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Business Venturing, the world’s leading academic journal dedicated to entrepreneurship. He joined Imperial Business School in 2025 after 17 years at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, where he was the David H. Jacobs Chair in Strategic Entrepreneurship. He is currently the consulting editor for the Journal of Business Venturing, a board member of numerous academic journals, a Representative at Large for the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management, and the former Editor-in-Chief of Business Horizons, a top practitioner-oriented journal dedicated to the study of business.
Taking a polymathic approach to entrepreneurship scholarship, Jeff draws on concepts and methods from the social sciences, humanities, and physical sciences to research the nature, causes, and consequences of entrepreneurial action. For each of the last six years, a Stanford University survey has ranked him among the top 2% of the world’s scientists in terms of research impact. He has published over 100 articles, best paper proceedings, and book chapters that have garnered over 25,000 citations according to Google Scholar, and have received numerous awards, including the Academy of Management’s Best Conceptual Paper Award (2002, 2024) and its prestigious, Foundational Paper Award (2018), which honours “a paper that has powerfully and positively changed the conversation in the field of entrepreneurship for at least a decade.”