In recent years there has been an outburst of studies aiming to advance our understanding of how actors do work to create, maintain and disrupt institutions. Drawing on work on the Holocaust, a largely neglected event in organization theory, we explore types of institutional work through which actors first maintain domination and grant acquiescence to oppression and, second, target oppressive systems through acts of resistance. This approach offers an opportunity to study a familiar set of processes and phenomena on fresh terms and to focus on key elements that existing studies on institutional work have neglected.

Social movement scholars and activists have recognized the difficulties of mobilizing people for the long haul, moving from the exuberance of the protest to the dull and ordinary work necessary to produce sustainable change. Drawing on ethnographic work in La Juanita, in Greater Buenos Aires, we look at local actions for and from the neighborhood in order to resist political domination, taken by people who have been unemployed for long periods of time. We identified concrete and local practices and interventions—which we call mundane and everyday politics – that are embedded in a territory and go beyond the typical practices of social movements and the expected infrapolitical activity in allowing the disfranchised to engage in the political process.

In this inductive, exploratory study, we explore how emotions affect the agency of vulnerable persons and their engagement in social innovation to challenge oppressive institutional constraints. By presenting the in-depth case of a successful entrepreneur from a shantytown, we show how emotions affect the construction of a self that contributes to the reproduction of social order rather than change, and how effective interventions can break the cycle of poverty and hopelessness that is dominant among excluded people. We find that this process is fragile and contingent on the presence of known strangers—that is, a web of actors that contributes not only resources but also emotional engagement that helps the emergence and development of low-power actors’ projectivity. We identify mechanisms for and provide a model of the development and emergence of the projective self that is necessary to engage in future-oriented agency.

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Studying entrepreneurship in the context of recession and (post)crisis opens up a set of important questions regarding the relationship between entrepreneuring, social relations, and social change. In drawing upon insights from a 2-year ethnographic study of the Spanish’s Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (Mortgage Victims Platform), known as the PAH, this article centers on the mobilization of rather unlikely citizens to a process in which most of them never thought they would be part of. We suggest that a renewed engagement with such insights regarding the emergence of new forms of organizing, the development of (new?) forms of relationality and being together, and the role of different forms of emotions in hindering/favoring agency, offers important avenues to enrich entrepreneurship research.