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

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.