“…Our analysis was informed by the prospective narrative approach (Beckert & Bronk, 2018;Boje, 2001;Sools et al, 2015), which suggests that narratives are a suitable means or space for individuals to construct forward-looking imaginations of the self in a world that might come to be (Bruner, 1995;Förster, Liberman & Shapira, 2009;Weick, Sutcliffe & Obstfeld, 2005). As such, the prospective entrepreneurial narratives produced by the students in North Korea are externalisations of their future imaginations (Chiles et al, 2021;Dimov, 2020;Garud et al, 2014;Trope & Liberman, 2010), which help reveal how individuals construct their future entrepreneurial self and the imagined state of their future entrepreneurial engagement (Cornelissen & Clarke, 2010;Vaara et al, 2016;Wood et al, 2021) under the institutional constraints of a rigid planned economy (Hisrich & Grachev, 1993;Lu & Tao, 2010). This required a careful narrative approach to examining how the entrepreneurial stories may align with or challenge the dominant institutional discourse because "[w]hat is 'said' in a text always rests upon 'unsaid' assumptions" (Fairclough, 2003: 11).…”