It’s positioned desires, stupid! The role of desires in impactful methodologies for enterprise research

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Abstract
Why is there little discussion around positionalities and desires in enterprise research within economic geography and beyond? This paper advocates an ethico-political methodology by drawing on research praxes that articulate a need for situated knowledges. This article develops the case for enterprise research in which our positioned desires matter. Positioned desires acknowledge the role of desires as a critical aspect to appreciate the ethico-political aspects of knowledge production in enterprise research. These desires are positioned in a concrete historical and material-institutional context and should be open to interrogation in the research process. In order to arrive at this idea, I first review dominant forms of critical realism in economic geography, according to which the researcher analyzes an external ontological reality. I show how this misses to specify the ethico-political stakes of knowledge production. I exemplify this claim through an analysis of the ‘missing researchers’ in the Global Production Network literature and the performative exclusions that this positioned desire-free lacuna entails. Subsequently, I illustrate the implications of a ‘postcolonial ethico-onto-epistemology’, by examining the importance of positioned desires for doing enterprise research in Armenia and Georgia, showing the need for creativity in navigating ethically through a difficult terrain of manifold power differentials.

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