Date: 27 April 2026, Monday Time: 12.30 – 13.30 "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…