As cases of COVID-19 were rising in India and the country's political leadership instituted a nationwide lockdown, one of the authors of this article received a timely invitation from a frienda government official to make rounds with him and his team to various neighbourhoods within the metropolitan city of Bangalore. The team consisted of members working in healthcare, municipal corporation, and local police, and was tasked with ensuring that the government enacted measures of social distancing were being observed by local residents in public spaces. The author witnessed, in real time, the ways in which residents were engaging with the containment measures that were instituted as part of the political leadership's attempt to flatten the curve of COVID-19. What was observed in an urban slum was particularly poignant and illuminating. The observations captured how, for residents of the urban slum, social distancing is more an aspiration than an attainable reality. Indeed, social distancing is impossible if such a protocol does not come with concomitant economic support targeted to the most socially vulnerable in society.

To encourage new research on the role of institutions in the entrepreneurial process in less developed countries (LDCs), the authors propose a conceptual framework to investigate concurrent institutional constraints. The authors define these constraints as geopolitical contexts that encounter simultaneous challenges to well functioning formal and informal institutions. Systems of stronger institutions compensating for weaker institutions are hampered in these settings and such systems weigh heavier on local entrepreneurs and further challenge their ability to mobilize resources and access market opportunities. By investigating the extreme operating conditions of these settings, scholars gain a deeper understanding of how entrepreneurs confront operational dilemmas and express agency through engaging with bricolage and cultural entrepreneurship. To animate these proposals, the authors consider a case illustration of a venture operating under such constraints.

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Several management scholars have recently discussed the consequences that emerge from the institutional pressures for research output. While an important debate for the field, thus far, it has wholly neglected to account for the voices of doctoral students—arguably, the most disempowered constituents within the academy. Working from a doctoral student’s perspective, the aim of this article is to integrate anecdotal evidence with Foucault’s idea of the panopticon gaze so as to illuminate how such institutional pressures become discursively codified. As argued, one especially poignant implication that materializes from the reification of these institutional pressures is intellectual inertia. This article concludes with some consideration of how our discipline can more fruitfully serve doctoral students by holistically embracing the concept of ‘ontological empathy’ and by redefining the meaning of ‘success’. Realization of ontological empathy and the redefinition of success will provide a constructive way to move beyond the orthodoxy of how research output is currently being defined and valued.