Bandersnatch and the entrepreneurial imagination: using critical literary methods to illustrate how antenarrative imagination emancipates entrepreneurs from path dependent storytelling

Entrepreneurs use narrative imagination, coherent stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, to make sense of their ventures and communicate with audiences. Yet historical choices limit which futures an entrepreneur deems possible, a process called path dependence. In this paper, we introduce antenarrative imagination: the fluid, fragmented possibilities that precede fully formed narratives. By analyzing the interactive film Bandersnatch, we illustrate how entrepreneurs can cyclically unsettle entrenched storylines, thereby challenging linear, deterministic assumptions. Our critical framework shows that quotidian decisions can cumulatively reshape an entrepreneur’s path. We propose a shift from a brute bureaucratic ontology to an ontology of imagination, thus theorizing power as control over imagination. We extend entrepreneurial storytelling in three ways. First, antenarrative imagination disrupts path dependence. Second, narrative and antenarrative processes iteratively transform entrepreneurs’ identities. Third, critical literary methods function as a distinct theory-expressive method alongside qualitative theory-generative and quantitative theory-testing methods. Finally, we call for theory explaining how taken-for-granted processes of prioritizing wealth, assuming classifications, suppressing emotion, and enforcing ethnicity all act to create path dependent control over imagination by rendering alternatives unthinkable. Thus, we conclude that the most important unanswered question in entrepreneurship has become ‘How can we uncork the imagination?’