Who are the brain police? Reading pessimism into emancipatory entrepreneuring with Frank Zappa
本文借用弗兰克·扎帕的摇滚歌词，将悲观主义视角引入解放型创业研究，揭示智力约束如何内在于创业者的自主梦想，以平衡文献中的乐观偏向。
This paper uses a selection of rock lyrics by Frank Zappa to read pessimism into emancipatory entrepreneuring. Our approach is meant to complement an arguable optimistic bias in the literature, which emphasizes how entrepreneurs overcome or abolish constraints to autonomy. Pessimistic readings, in contrast, could enrich and improve our understanding by highlighting how constraints are disclosed. Our reading of Zappa’s lyrics brings to the fore intellectual constraints as inherent to the entrepreneurial dreams for autonomy. The paper ends with a discussion on how to account for the interdependency of constraints and autonomy, and how pessimistic readings could ‘push back’ the emancipatory agenda in entrepreneurship studies to include the discovery of constraints to autonomy.