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.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethico-onto-epistemology
• diverse economies
• GPN
• performativity
• missing links

Introduction

Critical realism is a profoundly important metatheory in contemporary economic geography, ‘particularly among those concerned with causal explanations of urban and regional economic change’ (Yeung 2019, 232). In enterprise-related research, too, critical realism as a metatheory often undergirds the research process, but rarely in an explicit fashion. In this paper, I will show how the employment of critical realism in economic geography has led to invisibilizing the positioned desires of the researcher and how a re-accountabilization can lead to research praxes that tackle the question of who benefits from research more profoundly. I exemplify the shortcomings of approaches that are inattentive to positionality and desire by showing how a peculiar interpretation of critical realism in the influential Global Production Network (GPN) perspective re-introduces through the backdoor the unmarked researcher as the universal knowledge producer. While my own research benefits from GPN’s sophisticated way of constructing a network, I show how an ‘ethico-onto-epistem-ological’ edge to this kind of reasoning can lead to research praxes that are more attuned to other ways of being, knowing, doing and relating to the world, making research more accountable to the worlds that it co-produces. In acknowledgement of, but also in contradistinction to, this peculiar form of critical realism, I will employ science and technology studies, postcolonial and decolonial economic and development geography as well as diverse economies scholarship as research praxes that openly problematise but also embrace the positioned desires of the researcher. The umbrella term ‘ethico-onto-epistem-ology’ makes sense of these approaches that call in different ways for scrutinising our positionalities. I apply these findings to my own enterprise research context in Armenia and Georgia, using a diverse economies inflexed approach.

Critical realism, ethico-onto-epistemology and enterprise research

Before I assess critical realism’s influence on economic geography, it is worth reconstructing the main contours of it. Bhaskar’s original intervention can be conceived as a reply to the by then predominant view in the philosophy of science that has privileged epistemology over ontology (Bhaskar 2013, 193). For Bhaskar, this results in the practice of ‘epistemic fallacy’ according to which questions of reality (ontology) are transformed into, and reduced to, questions about what we can know about reality (epistemology). Resisting such an epistemologization of reality, Bhaskar positions a reality that exists independent of human beings making sense of this reality (‘ontological realism’) as the point of departure. By situating the ontological question centre stage, Bhaskar relegates epistemology to an important, but not overarching, part of knowledge production. To make sense of this argument, Bhaskar asserts that we cannot gain direct access to reality, but only via theories, paradigms and specific methods making sense of that reality. Therefore, all knowledge is plural and fallible. Bhaskar was thus deeply aware of what he called ‘epistemological relativism’ (Bhaskar 2013, 198, 202). Epistemological relativism denotes various ways of approaching and knowing reality. It is noteworthy to recall that Bhaskar was concerned with accounting for the intelligibility of natural science experiments in closed laboratories, and only subsequently discussing the problem of open systems (Bhaskar 2000). By starting from the laboratory and experiment as the epitome of knowledge production, Bhaskar wanted to both show the importance of methods and social location in creating access to reality – it is the researcher who is responsible for the specificity of the experiment – by at the same time downplaying its relevance. To fully appreciate the potency of critical realism, Bhaskar therefore introduces ‘judgmental rationality’ (Bhaskar 2011, 24), which mediates between ‘epistemological relativism’ and ‘ontological realism’ (Bhaskar 2013, 202). Judgemental rationality is concerned with ‘the necessity of making judgements and decisions about competing or contested epistemic accounts of reality and of developing the tools and criteria to do so (Quraishi et al. 2022, 26)’.

The god trick of critical realism?

In human and economic geography, varieties of critical realism enjoy a privileged position. The main merit of critical realism – showing that ontological questions are irreducible to epistemological ones – leads to a clear-cut division between ontology and epistemology as two distinct spheres. Such an approach was hailed in geography to overcome the alleged ‘anything goes’ of postmodernism (Lovering 1989; Sayer 1993) in which all truth claims appear as arbitrary and conditioned primarily by the all-encompassing discursive materiality that constitutes the knowledge producer.

Economic geographers have not only adopted critical realism but also modified it in a manner that even more obfuscates the social sources and power inequalities that characterise knowledge production. In an article on the importance of critical realism for an analysis for ‘uneven development’ in human geography at large Yeung sketches the importance of critical realism:

Bhaskar’s version of critical realism can be succinctly described as a social scientific philosophy that recognizes the existence of material reality independent of human consciousness (realist ontology), ascribes causal powers to properties/potential in objects and human reasons and their activation through generative mechanisms such as enduring social structures (realist ontology), rejects relativism in social and scientific discourses (realist epistemology) and reorientates the social sciences towards its emancipatory goals (realist epistemology) (Yeung 2019, 232).

In this characterisation, Yeung either abandons or disregards Bhaskar’s ‘epistemological relativism’ in favour of ‘realist epistemology’ that is defined in contradistinction to ‘relativism’. But nowhere did Bhaskar take for granted that alternative epistemologies do not pose a formidable problem to his account of critical realism. Altogether absent in Yeung’s review of critical realism is Bhaskar’s account of ‘judgmental rationality’ that is capable of handling the plurality of ways of knowing and the singularity of reality that we can never wish to fully apprehend.

But even Bhaskar’s original account stressing the salience of epistemological relativism re-introduces through the backdoor some knowledge producers as unmarked and capable of universalisation via their ‘judgmental rationality’; a problem that further aggravates in Yeung’s dismissal of epistemological relativism. The effect of this operation is that it denies allegedly non-scientific (read, non-experimental) forms of knowledge production to achieve the same degree of ‘judgmental rationality’. Bhaskar was acutely aware that ‘experiments’ might be insufficient for an analysis of open systems and that even the ‘closed system’ of the experiment is unable to account for the complex ontological reality (Bhaskar 2000, 49). At the same time, he was unable to specify what constitutes ‘judgmental rationality’ in such open systems in which the experiment is unavailable as the preferred method of inquiry, although at times Bhaskar invoked ‘meta-epistemic reflexivity and ethical (moral, social and political) responsibility on the part of the cognitive agents concerned (Bhaskar 2009, 17)’. Beyond such general gestures, scholars ‘noted an empirical absence in understanding of what judgemental rationality looks like in a concrete, empirical context (Quraishi et al. 2022, 26)’.

For both Bhaskar and especially Yeung, this eventually leads to underestimate the social sources of knowledge production. Scientific knowledge production remains largely unaccountable because critical realism obliterates how knowledge producers are historically constituted. The kind of critical realism adopted by economic geographers thus becomes akin to what Haraway calls the ‘god trick of seeing everything from nowhere’ (Haraway 1988, 581). For Haraway, ‘[epistemological r]elativism is the perfect mirror twin of totalization in the ideologies of objectivity; both deny the stakes in location, embodiment, and partial perspective’ (Haraway 1988, 584). Whereas Bhaskar, however, engaged with the problem of epistemological relativism, which is that ‘[t]he “equality” of positioning is a denial of responsibility and critical inquiry’ (Haraway 1988, 584) via his admittedly vague discussion around judgemental rationality, such a task seems less accomplished in geography.

Reconstructing judgemental rationality through postcolonial theory and standpoint feminism

A recent attempt by Albert et al. deals with critical realism’s shortcoming by taking the material-discursive constitution of knowledge producers more seriously (Albert et al. 2020). In their reconstruction of critical realism via postcolonial theory and standpoint feminism, they modify some of Bhaskar’s assumptions while maintaining the conceptual trinity of epistemological relativism, ontological realism and judgemental rationality. First, they question the strong ontology-epistemology divide by specifying that ‘epistemic fallacy’ should not commit the reverse ‘ontic fallacy’: of reducing epistemological to ontological questions (Albert et al. 2020, 360). Social location in which we produce knowledge is partly constitutive of, but irreducible to, the reality of which it speaks. Second, they embrace epistemological relativism, but specify that some social locations might be preferable to others in speaking about reality. Taking pains with the experiment as the preferred form of scientific inquiry, they call for inquiring subjugated knowledges as the preferred social location of knowledge production (Albert et al. 2020, pp. 361–363). This is the case because subjugated knowledges are more likely to experience the effects of being excluded from the academic construction of reality. The authors substantiate this claim with the exclusion of female experiences from experimental definitions of menstrual excess. Third, this shift entails then ‘a very different version’ (Albert et al. 2020, 362) of judgemental rationality. Decentring the experiment as a preferred form of inquiry in open systems, they argue that unequal power relations through which knowledges are produced are detrimental to understand how knowledge becomes real. While maintaining ontological realism, they nonetheless hint at the fractured ways in which such realities are experienced. Subjugated knowledges, they furthermore argue, are particularly illuminating to underscore how unmarked ‘scientific’ knowledge practices can often be traced to the white, male, able-bodied gaze that masquerades behind ‘objectivity’ (Albert et al. 2020, 362).

Barad’s ethico-onto-epistem-ology as an alternative to critical realism

Sympathising with the attempt to partly reunite epistemology and ontology, I think the generalisation of feminist science studies as ‘standpoint feminism’ contributes to underestimating the extent to which this scholarship offers serious lessons for a) the experiment itself b) the relationship between researchers and other knowledge producers and c) the ethico-political stakes and performativity of research. Although Albert et al.’s reconstruction of critical realism is helpful to gain a more nuanced picture of epistemology, it requires further specification regarding the ethico-political stakes in the researcher-researched relationship.

To make sense of this proposition, I refer to Barad’s ‘ethico-onto-epistem-ology’ (Barad 2007, 90; 185) which I see applied in various forms in diverse economies, postcolonial/decolonial economic/development geography and feminist science studies from where it originates. Taking sides with the assertion that ontology and epistemology cannot be neatly separated from each other, Barad adds an important qualification with the prefix ‘ethico’: Knowledge projects are not only situated. They also entail politico-ethical aspects. The ‘we’ that Barad employs is therefore ambiguous, since it tries to abolish the ‘we/them’, ‘subject/object’, ‘scientific/social knowledge’, ‘researcher/researched’ binaries on which traditional research operates: ‘We are not merely differently situated in the world; “each of us” is part of the intraactive ongoing articulation of the world in its differential mattering’ (Barad 2007, 381).

Precisely our entanglements as researchers in the research process thus entail ‘responsibility and accountability for the entanglements “we” help enact and what kinds of commitments “we” are willing to take on’ (Barad 2007, 382). Such a rendering does not pit experiments/closed laboratory against other methods/open systems. In the experiment but also beyond, ‘we’ researchers are not only guided by a ‘disinterested’ ethics of truth towards some ontologically pre-existing ‘objects’ that we inquire about. Even within the laboratory, a bodily ethics of care might be more accurately describing how scholars investigate and bring into being and temporarily stabilise the objects that they examine (La Bellacasa 2011; Myers 2008). As a result, even laboratory practices themselves speak to a world in which the objects of inquiry matter as much as the positionality of the researchers:

Humans do not simply assemble different apparatuses for satisfying particular knowledge projects but are themselves specific parts of the world’s ongoing reconfiguring. To the degree that laboratory manipulations, observational interventions, concepts, and other human practices have a role to play, it is as part of the material configuration of the world in its intra-active becoming (Barad 2007, pp. 184–185).

Barad thus formulates her ethico-onto-epistem-ology as a commitment to realism but in a way different to the one proposed by most economic geographers. Even the degree to which we can speak about a mind-independent reality that precedes any kind of method is questioned without abandoning the ‘real’ as meaningful reference point. Rather, methods and the material configurations how we produce knowledges – Barad calls them apparatuses – are constitutive of reality: ‘Realism, then, is not about representations of an independent reality but about the real consequences, interventions, creative possibilities, and responsibilities of intra-acting within and as part of the world (Barad 2007, 37)’.

This rendering of research as a performative field resonates with diverse economies scholarship. As Gibson-Graham argues:

When ontology becomes the effect rather than the ground of knowledge, we lose the comfort and safety of a subordinate relation to ‘reality’ and can no longer seek to capture accurately what already exists; interdependence and creativity are thrust upon us as we become implicated in the very existence of the worlds that we research. Every question about what to study and how to study it becomes an ethical opening; every decision entails profound responsibility. The whole notion of academic ethics is simultaneously enlarged and transformed (Gibson-Graham 2008, 620).

But in order to be called ‘realism’, Barad emphasises that such responsibility is not a purely ‘linguistic’ affair of producing representations of the world, rooted in a too strong confidence regarding the performative power of language itself (Barad 2007, 133). Realism denotes the very possibility that the concepts in our material enactment face resistances. Objectivity, then, is the ability of phenomena to ‘object’ our account of the world (Latour 2005, pp. 124–125). In diverse economies scholarship, this phenomena- and practice-oriented dimension has gained momentum and fieldwork is precisely conceived as the encounter of matter and meaning both of which are intricately enmeshed (Gibson-Graham 2004; Schmid 2020). As Alhojärvi argues, tackling capitalocentrism should not only be a discursive strategy, or even a thing achieved, but a political project interacting with material resistances (Alhojärvi, 2020).¹ In such a reading, diverse economies comes closer to a conception according to which ‘performativity is precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real (Barad 2007, 133)’.

Diverse economies scholarship attempts to lay open the genealogy of its own positioning and how this positioning shapes, both in the sense of enabling and inhibiting, the research process. Thus, it seeks to be accountable to others, might they be scholars or research participants. One of diverse economies scholarship’s main objective is to visibilise and further enhance economic spaces of collective well-being that dominant accounts invisibilise. It thereby offers a critique of non-embodied universalist knowledge claims.

Missing researchers in global production networks

I exemplify the reductions by examining the ‘missing researchers’ in the GPN perspective, which is a most prominent example of critical realism in the service of geographically informed enterprise research (Coe and Yeung 2015, 115n1). With the term ‘missing researchers’, I take inspiration from an emerging discussion about the ‘missing links’ in enterprise network analysis (Ibert et al. 2019; Kleibert et al. 2020). ‘Missing links’ are associated with corporate tactics of dissociation from the network in which corporate actors are enrolled and the ‘strategic agency’ behind such dissociations (Ibert et al. 2019). Formulated with an ambition to visibilise the ‘dark places’ that powerful enterprises invisibilise, I see the ‘missing researchers’ as an important sub-category of the ‘missing link’ genre.

Missing links advise us to ask: Are researchers part of the ‘network’ that they analyse? Do they modify reality in their research praxis (and if yes, how so)? The short answers to these questions – from the point of view of its architects – would seem ‘no’ for the first part and a cautious ‘yes’ for the second part. GPN scholarship has acknowledged the world-making character of our academic concepts (Dicken et al. 2001). At the same time, nowhere is it explicitly stated to what kind of a world the GPN contributes to. But this denial of the researcher as an actor within the network relies on a self-invisibilization that can be accounted for. The GPN approach – so critical realism’s employment – ‘is concerned with grounded material practices’ (Coe and Yeung 2015, 167) and therefore does not require disclosing the social position from which its intervention is formulated. Naturally, the degree to which researchers can be regarded as part of the network depends very much on the exact method of engagement. But even in case there is no face-to-face contact with the enterprises (e.g. when publicly available data is used), there is still a possibility that researchers’ findings will be published, shared, discussed and some of the ideas taken up or implemented by enterprises, policy-makers or communities. Since there cannot be any guarantee for leaving no traces (which would be a dubious aspiration to begin with), the radical potential of an ethico-onto-epistemology lies in the insistence that there is no way out of performativity and no way to secure a distanced position external to the network.

GPN is far away from being an apolitical instrument. It is sufficient to note that one of its main architects evoked human geography’s very ‘raison d’être’ as targeting ‘the possibility of reclaiming reality through an emancipatory social science (Yeung 2019, 232)’. GPN scholars state that they are concerned ‘to foreground uneven development and its production as the key feature of capitalism we are seeking to understand (Coe and Yeung 2015, 167)’. The problem is that GPN does not make visible enough how this intervention ‘helps to produce research that contributes more effectively to the task of improving the human condition’ (Henderson et al. 2002, 458) as it was originally formulated. How this kind of intervention is beneficial to the ‘human condition’ remains obscure since we are not offered an account of the judgemental rationality (to stay in the terms of critical realism) or positioned desires on the basis of which we could judge what improvement means.

To be fair, GPN accounts for some of its exclusions, justifies them and thereby takes on accountability. This is the case when they relegate more-than-capitalist practices to something beyond the remit of GPN (Coe and Yeung 2015, 196n2). Or similarly when stating that the focus of GPN ‘is on economic development, rather than development more generally (Coe and Yeung 2015, 167)’. Yet, self-reflexively acknowledging exclusions without showing the performative character of these exclusions is an ambiguous operation:

But the mere acknowledgment of the fact that … scholars are actors involved in performing their own set of practices doesn’t go nearly far enough. Turning the mirror back on oneself is not the issue, and reflexivity cannot serve as a corrective here. Rather, the point is that these entangled practices are productive, and who and what are excluded through these entangled practices matter: different intra-actions produce different phenomena. … The point is this: one can’t simply bracket (or ignore) certain issues without taking responsibility and being accountable for the constitutive effects of these exclusions (Barad 2007, 58).

The performative exclusions in GPN arguably stem from the undertheorised social position and desires that inform the scholars’ judgemental rationality. The social positions relate to research subjects that are partly constituted by the discourse of capitalist ‘development’.² How is economic development, as the basis of an analysis of its unevenness, defined?

It is value capture, however, that we argue is the most important dimension in developmental terms. This refers to the ability of firms to retain the surplus within their organizational boundaries in the context of the wider power dynamics within a global production network (Coe and Yeung 2015, 171).

On the one hand, we thus see an acknowledgement of epistemological relativism. It is not the ‘economy’ that argues here, nor a passive voice, but an explicitly stated ‘we’. On the other hand, Coe and Yeung do not put enough emphasis on how such an analysis of surplus value capture leads to desirable outcomes from within their point of view. Such a narrow view of economic development re-inscribes surplus value as a thing to be possessed, therefore perpetuating (surplus) value capture as the main angle through which ‘we’ – as researchers – engage with enterprises, starting from our conceptual approach to the everyday encounters in our fieldwork.

A growing body of scholarly work takes pains with ‘uneven development’ as the critical grounding of human and economic geography. Behind the naturalised definition of development in terms of value creation, enhancement and capture lies a pluriverse of ‘surplus possibilities’(Gibson-Graham 2005) and other worlds that the GPN framework renders less relevant. An analysis of uneven development ignores other ways of creating value (beyond surplus value). This leads to the dangers of a universalist catch-up discourse, in which researchers impose their own vision of what they find desirable (that enterprises shall seek to capture surplus value) as a context-independent definition of success.

Economic development as a universal yardstick makes unintelligible those practices of companies that are not rooted in capturing the surplus as a goal in itself but that are nonetheless directed at producing economic, social or ecological value. ‘Doing’ GPN or any other kind of enterprise-related research therefore also requires an acknowledgement of not only the performative character in terms of both what it conceptually visibilises but also invisibilises, prioritises and deprioritises. It needs furthermore a recognition of what such a conceptual approach means in terms of materially grounded fieldwork encounters with enterprises and other stakeholders. I will turn to this interplay of theory and research practice now.

A post-colonial ethico-onto-epistemology in Armenia and Georgia?

In my own enterprise-centred research in Armenia and Georgia, I have to deal with some crucially important contextual factors that place my research in a longer history of Northern institutions and researchers doing research in the South Caucasus and that make ‘missing researchers’ especially problematic.³ First, a lack of collaboration between researchers from Northern institutions and from the region itself, perhaps perpetuated by the North/South binary that excludes ‘Eastern’ subjects as knowledge producers (Kuzhabekova 2020). Similar to how helicopter research is increasingly problematised in North-South context (Minasny et al. 2020), so are the power differentials and unequal positionings between Western and Eastern researchers subject to scrutiny (Suyarkulova 2018). Second, another critique of extractivism gains traction according to which Northern research appropriates the vision of ‘Eastern’ subjects in a manner that is unable to benefit the so-called researched (Beurskens et al. 2021; Suyarkulova 2019). As ethico-onto-epistem-ology invites us to ask why differences matter, how, and for whom, the concern about the performative effects, and realities our research process helps to create, poses a tremendous challenge to the overall project.

The limitations to pursue an ethico-onto-epistemology in enterprise research in Armenia and Georgia

I start my reflection with the assertion that

the initial framing of a postcolonial method must be in terms of why the research is being conducted in the first place. If a postcolonial approach involves critical recognition of the material and discursive legacies of colonialism, then a postcolonial method has no option but to be a politically engaged method that forefronts the ethical issues of who gains from this research and why. The researcher must be clear about the power relations, inequalities and injustices that enable and allow their research to occur and must be committed to working towards challenging these at different scales – the personal, the institutional, the global political (Raghuram and Madge 2006, 275).

Such a rendering resonates with Barad’s ethico-onto-epistemology and thus in my understanding is not only confined to postcolonial contexts.⁴ At the same time, it is more specific in so far as it invites to rethink what happens when Northern researchers and institutions foster knowledge projects by tapping into the knowledge sources of the South (or East for that matter) in the name of provincialising their academic fields such as economic geography, an obvious aspiration of our project. Thus, the statement holds valuable points to ponder for an ethico-onto-epistemological methodology. In the following, I address, first, who might benefit from ‘my’ particular knowledge project, which requires a background of the research topic. Second, I offer an analysis of how my own material embeddedness in a ‘collaborative research center’ (CRC) provides both limitations and enablers for pursuing a knowledge project that cannot undo coloniality but wishes to navigate ethically through it.

Applying to oneself the ‘intrarelationality’ that an ethico-onto-epistemology postulates means to appreciate the enabling and constraining, the empowering and oppressive, relations within which research unfolds and that help to create some phenomena. In this regard, my dissertation itself is rooted in a genealogy that requires its own interpretative methods to understand how it shapes encounters in the research process. Rather than starting the analysis of positionality from pre-fixed categories that shape my vision (cis, white, male, able-bodied), I approach the issue of positionality from a rather institutionalist perspective without suggesting dismissing the former approach. While all of the above-mentioned categories, and especially their intersections, have an undeniable importance, I see the danger of employing them as tokens with only perfunctory functions: Things to be listed in order to be subsequently abandoned as a recognition of partial, embodied perspective from which no action follows and which abstracts from historical specificity. Enumeration without specification in which ways those categories play out in the research process is not pushing the issue of positionality and performativity much further. Precisely because I am often relatively unaware of how these categories influence research, I leave them somewhat unaddressed here, but provide them to others to decide to what extent I and my research interest and desires speak to, and might stem from, such categories.

Being part of a competitive CRC funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), my PhD is embedded in a larger project that seeks to analyse ‘processes of spatialization under the global condition’. I started my PhD in the second funding phase of the CRC, which reversely meant that long before I applied to the Teilprojekt (part project), a 16 page long ‘project proposal’ and associated ‘research questions’ were formulated that would align with the overall research objectives of the second funding phase of the CRC. Research proposal and questions proceeded from the gaps in the literature, from the relational situation of the part project within the CRC, and were primarily directed at making a theoretical contribution within mostly Anglophone and academic globalisation debates. The contribution of our part project lies in analysing to what extent innovative technology enterprise in Armenia and Georgia reproduces or contests Northern conceptions of the global knowledge economy (which we call and construct as a ‘spatial order’). To address this question, the GPN perspective was initially very helpful.

The DFG roots CRCs in Grundlagenforschung (fundamental or basic research), which is usually conceived as the more important counterpart of the in many ways inferiorised anwendungsorientierte or angewandte Forschung (applied research). And while the distinction certainly is not, and should not be, conceived as a mutually exclusive dichotomy, the very discursive framing as Grundlagenforschung is conducive to scientific practices that leave the ‘applied’ aspects, including the question of who benefits from research, subordinated to the quest for theory-building as a goal in itself.

But the embeddedness in an area/global studies-oriented CRC has other profound implications as well. What does ‘collaborative’ in CRCs mean? By collaborative, collaboration between researchers from various disciplines within a sub-national region is implied.⁵ Collaboration does not refer to the previously discussed collaboration between researchers that receive funding (me in Leipzig) and researchers from the area in which research takes place (in my case Armenia/Georgia). Moreover, collaborative does not imply a collaborative method between researchers in Leipzig and other research participants on which my PhD project is premised. Indeed, there are some barriers to a collaborative method with both other researchers from Armenia and Georgia as well as with research participants themselves. While a CRC is generally materially well equipped, most of the available money flows into the salaries of staff and our travel expenses. In our project, it is only the non-negligible travel expenses that can be used for, and transformed into, hiring local researchers under very complex guidelines.⁶ Research participants, in principle, are expected to collaborate without material remuneration.

This raises intriguing questions about the desirability of a ‘collaborative’ and less extractive method that aims at transforming researcher-researched, Northern PhD student-Eastern assistant distinctions. The question ‘who benefits?’ should obviously refrain from making too strong gestures to monetisation logics, and cannot be answered beforehand in an open-ended dialogue. Yet, can I reasonably expect research participants to work even more intensely in developing a research question, in not only involving them for ‘data collection’ purposes but engaging with them in data evaluation, without offering any tangible material compensation? Would such an approach not, reversely, even add insult (more unpaid appropriation) to injury (already existing data extraction)? That the CRC pays me lavishly for Armenian/Georgian standards is a painful point that further aggravates the unequal terms of collaboration in a context where most people struggle to make a living, also within the enterprises that I work with. Is a ‘thank you’ to local researchers and research participants in the ‘acknowledgement’ section of a journal article enough commitment to a more ethical research praxis (compared to completely erasing and invisibilizing their contribution)? Obtaining a PhD – at least in Germany – furthermore consists of writing with sole intellectual ownership,⁷ notwithstanding the ubiquitous recognition that a PhD is never the heroic journey of a single person alone.

Again, who benefits in broader terms? I cannot exclude that the language of our CRC can be beneficial for research participants and other stakeholders. My few initial attempts to explain the relevance of my research in our CRC terms to non-academic research participants and stakeholders at best provoked a change of topic and perhaps unwillingly elevated me into the ranks and files of the academic ivory tower of German Grundlagenforschung. It failed to function as a starting point to identify common themes, stakes and futures. What is the benefit that research participants know how they challenge or reproduce Northern conceptions of a global knowledge economy and how their data help us in provincialising Anglophone economic geography? Who benefits from putting subaltern, Eastern, Southern, marginalised and/or peripheralised experiences at the centre stage of academic knowledge production? Then, an intriguing question arises why research subjects are willing to collaborate, which I cannot answer authoritatively. Next to making their enterprises visible, some are profoundly interested in academic reflections upon their work. Lastly, historically embedded norms of (racialised) hospitality might constitute another reason for collaboration. Yet, the time resource/benefit ratio always features dominantly, though rarely in an explicit fashion. How much time am I, and how much time is the enterprise, willing to invest? This all depends on what I am able to offer and thus the translation exercise from speaking to the gaps in the Anglophone literature to an understandable idiom is all the more important.

The main point here is that there are some institutional limitations towards a more collaborative and equitable, less exploitative and Northern-centric research that sees theory itself more as practice (Raghuram and Madge 2006, 278). Quite obviously, research cannot undo existing power differentials in the political economy of knowledge production in which the gains are most pronouncedly reaped by Northern researchers – often in a monopolistic fashion not unlike the corporate capitalist counterparts that geographers analyse – with less relevance reserved for validating the local or ‘applied’ relevance by the nature of institutional design.

Simultaneously, I resist a hopelessness resulting in the inevitable reproduction of already existing power differentials. There is ample space for tactical manoeuvre and subtle subversions that make a CRC more attuned towards the undeniable demands of a decolonising economic geography and that a wide range of actors similarly support, from the administration, my supervisor, fellow CRC members, listening friends to local researchers and research participants. There is space for ethics, responsibility and negotiation. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Healy argues that ‘an act is “ethical” when it is undertaken without reference to an externalised symptom (Healy 2010, 497)’. By traversing fantasies about the far-reaching material-discursive power of the CRC or any differently constituted symptom (‘neoliberal university’, ‘capitalism’, ‘coloniality of knowledge’, etc.), is the researcher ‘capable of acting ethically because his or her identity is no longer secured by the externalised symptom that bears his or her resentment’ (Healy 2010, 503)?

I think this is the case not only because there are indeed signs that such an ethical attitude allows for the activation of potentials and secures oneself against the twin perils of cynicism or the allures of the masculinist revolution that can see subversion only in ‘global’ terms.

Navigating ethically in enterprise research

An institutionally non-decolonised CRC is not a fate or destiny. From the onset of my contract, it was clear that there is also some space for adapting the overall objectives and research questions to my desires, to validate the relevance of the research questions for research participants and stakeholders while maintaining the centrality to contribute to our CRC. As I lived around two years in Georgia and learned Georgian and subsequently Russian languages adequately and have kinship, friendship and academic ties to the region, I am arguably not a caricaturised helicopter researcher deeply unfamiliar with the diverse ways of life in the region. At the same time, my diverse economies affinities, slowly emerging during my master studies, gained additional momentum while navigating through the project proposal. First, I am attracted to diverse economies commitment to embodied, partial perspective that does not treat such partial perspective as a ‘deficit’ but as a productive force. To be more concrete, ‘positionality’ is not the only issue at stake because such a framing too strongly relies on an essentialised notion of stable personhood. Diverse economies engages with researchers’ desires and articulates a willingness to transform not only the research subjects but also oneself in the process of doing research (Healy 2010), thus calling for a deeply ethico-political knowledge project aimed at bringing into being new economies of well-being. Positioned desires would be therefore my preferred concept. Positioned desires contain both the notion of researchers as historically constituted but similarly conditioned by changeable desires. Positioned desires, then, express the entanglement of both positionality/situated knowledge and desires.

In the concrete context of enterprise research, diverse economies does not juxtapose enterprises to the flourishing of life on this planet. At the same time, it is clear about which kind of a diverse economy it strives for: namely a community economy in which the negotiation of planetary and/or community well-being defines what the community economy constitutes (Gibson-Graham 2019). To the extent that (more-than-)capitalist practices by enterprises contribute to the aim of community and planetary well-being, diverse economies invites such practices as well and does not subscribe to a blind anti-capitalism as critics charge (Curry 2005). Diverse economies’ language of surplus value as an ethico-political opening to replenish communities, instead of an object to be possessed, aroused considerably more interest among the selected enterprises. The Community Economies Return on Investment (CEROI) tool (Petrescu et al. 2021), finally, also expressed in a different language what some of these enterprises were aiming at, namely at creating diverse forms of value. Especially, the language of investment in, and returns on, ‘surviving well, distributing surplus, responsibly encountering others’ (Petrescu et al. 2021, 164) was taken up by some enterprises with enthusiasm, while others politely declined to co-produce them due to time constraints.

While the necessity to reimagine and enact economies beyond the drive of surplus value capture is asserted by many traditions, there are some caveats to this approach in Armenia and Georgia. First of all, in often nationalistic attempts to contest and break with the Soviet past, many Armenians and Georgians have embraced capitalist entrepreneurialism and desires in a manner inconceivable elsewhere. Since older generations had experienced chronic consumer goods shortages during the Soviet Union themselves, many are sceptical about any kind of Marx-ish and left-ish language (a lineage that is discernible in diverse economic thinking as well).⁸ Speaking to residents in and outside of the capital cities, Yerevan and Tbilisi often bring to the fore a deep-seated desire to lead more proletarianised and wage-labour-based economic ways of life beyond the hardships of a semi-subsistence economy, which indeed is difficult to fully apprehend from my affluent position and lack of lived experience. So what happens when such an approach, embodied in the researcher and formulated initially between an Australian and an American Marxian feminist, travels to Armenia and Georgia’s regions? While diverse economies has gained a foothold in Latin America and partially South East Asia, there are no territorially embedded members of post-Soviet countries in the Community Economies Research Network, which speaks perhaps to the possibility of its unattractiveness.⁹

At the same time, the very neoliberal political economy also nurtures scepticism against most forms of ‘actually existing’ entrepreneurialism. My conversations with academics, friends, activists and others are subjected to a generalised mistrust according to which enterprises are imagined by default to opt for socially exploitative and environmentally destructive practices. To name one example, the Georgian Facebook page ara monobas (‘no to slavery’) by the Human Rights Monitoring Center constantly visibilises exploitative working conditions that even violate the almost non-existent workers’ rights in the country.¹⁰ Capitalist practices and mental infrastructures are desired, yet their actual implementation is viewed with scepticism. Therefore, my own desires must not only be reconciled with the impossibility that ‘all difference can be dissolved’ (Raghuram and Madge 2006, 276) between researchers and research participants. Moreover, there is a profound need to admit the antagonisms and conflicting desires within Armenian/Georgian society and that my own desires resonate rather with the desires of a small, hardly ‘organized’, opposition that seeks to build economies beyond the arguably false monolithic choice between state-led socialism and capitalism with a somewhat human face.¹¹ My own partial and non-innocent perspective must therefore converse with

a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a “real” world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness (Haraway 1988, 579)

The important point for Haraway is that reality must not be fully shared in an ethico-onto-epistemology as this would subscribe to the same global panoptic and disembodied analytic. Haraway’s call for earthwide projects of finite freedom shows affinities with diverse economies’ ambition to build community economies. To delineate why, how and for whom such a research program matters, development geographers rightfully emphasise the importance of early fieldwork for refining the research question more dialogically with the researched including possible willingness to weaken one’s positions (Raghuram and Madge 2006).

In my own research, I proceeded on many levels to formulate and validate the relevance of the research questions, namely in conversations with academics from the region and with enterprises themselves, somewhat omitting to include the communities in which such enterprises are embedded. The latter approach was obstructed by the pandemic but also the overall logic of my research project as the research sites and enterprises were yet (not) established. As a remedy, I engaged in a dialogue with geographers from Tbilisi State University during an (online) session where Joseph Salukvadze allowed me to present my preliminary framework to his PhD students.

Yet, is a dialogue with metropolitan Georgian researchers sufficient to investigate the relevance for something that decidedly wishes to address an issue that lies ‘outside’ of Tbilisi, notwithstanding the Georgian researchers’ experience and familiarity with Georgia’s regions? Did I therefore not concede too much importance to the category ‘Georgian’ compared to what was theoretically at stake (e.g. ‘peripherality’, ‘rurality’ and/or the intersections of several categories) to validate the relevance of my research? In retrospect, I think the way I proceeded was still most helpful taking into account the circumstances under which this research occurred, siding with the assertion that research, and especially ethnography, is ‘the art of the possible’ (Hannerz 2003, 213). It helped me to recalibrate the theoretical relevance of the overall approach as a space of possibility for new economic praxes. Moreover, despite the early stage of the research, the participants encouraged me to further pursue this path and re-assured me about the theoretical and practical relevance of the topic even in its original formulation.

A year later, organising a seminar on diverse economies in Yerevan among sociology students of Yerevan State University (YSU), I was interested in discussing both my by now more crystallised GPN and diverse economies leanings. If the GPN excludes practices beyond ‘value capture’, what does ‘my’ diverse economies-inflexed approach possibly exclude? Discussing the 2018 Roepke lecture in economic geography (Gibson-Graham et al. 2019), which much inspired my own research approach, brought to light acknowledgement of the diverse economies’ ability to visibilise caring practices of enterprises. At the same time, it raised discontent regarding what exactly an ethico-political approach should bring to the fore. Especially in its reliance on interviewing, particularly with management, so the criticism that I share, the above-mentioned paper perhaps takes the content of these interviews too much at face value and indeed risks taking the representational moment too seriously. The students’ reservations resonated with Barad’s assertion that performativity is about curtailing the power of language itself. If thought to the end, we must indeed also consider the dark sides of performativity. There is a sense of urgency to evade the reverse mistake of GPN research: namely to visibilise only the (discursive) caring practices of enterprises and thereby possibly contributing to carewashing. Thus, the students at YSU urged for an approach that takes into account at least the local voices surrounding an enterprise given the impossibility of a truly multi-sited ethnography due to the massively multi-scalar value relations of even the most ‘local’ enterprises. In the end,

[i]t is as important to recognize, for example, the extent of involvement of modern-day slavery in global capitalist supply chains, and actions to expose and eradicate it, as it is to identify the extent of cooperativism and practices of mutuality and actions to support them (Gibson-Graham and Dombroski 2020, 18).

Once we admit that researchers have their own positioned desires that can stand in conflict with the enterprise (which itself is not a black box but constituted by distinct positioned desires) or stakeholders, we must do our best to not simply condone practices we appear to dislike. Instead, we should work both at the transformation of our own positioned desires and those of research subjects in an open-ended dialogue. There is thus a need ‘to develop a profound understanding of the political project of the movement (not necessarily to share it in its entirety but to apprehend it fully)’ (Escobar 2018, 187). Research is also about admitting that subjects working in enterprises are capable of learning and being affected by findings that researchers can help bring to the table of negotiation within the power fields of an enterprise embedded in diverse socio-ecological relations.

Conclusion

The article sought an intervention in enterprises research in Anglophone economic geography but with implications for other research traditions as well. It specifically addresses the promises of an ethico-onto-epistemology and the pitfalls if our own positioned desires are obliterated in the research process. Drawing on new materialism, diverse economies and postcolonial/decolonial (development) geography, I argued for an approach that understands theory as practice and practice as theory and visibilises the importance of formulating more dialogical research that does not only speak to the gaps in the literature but also to enterprises and stakeholders themselves. The background of my engagement was my position in a German CRC and the desire to foster other-than-profit centred worlds, which are acutely relevant given the scope and speed through which developmentalist actors actively displace alternatives to capitalism in Armenia and Georgia. Diverse economies can offer profound lessons for enterprise research in its acknowledgement of the multiplicity of pathways to build resilient and less exploitative worlds. However, as my discussions with students from Yerevan and Tbilisi showed me, a too representationalist approach leaves ‘material’ issues unaddressed. To the extent that the researcher’s positioned desires in enterprise research can be productively employed under an ethico-onto-epistemological methodology, it also requires a recognition of the counterproductive effects of possibly contributing to carewashing of enterprises when interviews are taken too much at face value.

The intervention argued to treat researchers as not outside or above the network that they analyse, but as interested participants guided by an ethics of care. Such a rendering might eventually lead us away from a self-reflexive stance that would simply recognise that researchers are part of a production network. My hope for more enabling research practices in and for workplaces and other stakeholders is that researchers feel both the profound responsibility and new theoretical-practical openings when they see themselves as a non-innocent part of a temporary community that antagonistically seeks to negotiate economic well-being.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the funding from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft – DFG) via the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 1199, ‘Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition’, sub-project: ‘Innovative Technology Enterprises at Unusual Locations in Central Asia and Africa’. The publication of this article was funded by the Open Access Fund of the Leibniz Association.

Notes on contributors

Markus Sattler

Markus Sattler studied political science, geography and International Relations in Bremen, Berlin, Potsdam, Prague and Istanbul. He is mainly interested in the contested economies of the “Global East”. Since 2020, he is working at the IfL as a doctoral student and researcher.

Notes

1. Diverse economies research praxis problematises as ‘capitalocentrism’ the idea that all economic practices should be read only in relation (of subordination) to capitalism.

2. Yet, the discourse on development is entangled with discourses and practices of whiteness, patriarchy and ableism (Escobar 1994).

3. For a lack of English-language publications on the topic, I will mostly refer to sources from Central Asia that in my reading, however, show close affinities with the problematique as given in the South Caucasus.

4. Thus, there are some caveats to this approach because first of all, it requires clarification to what extent we are confronted with ‘material and discursive legacies of colonialism’ in Armenia and Georgia, a complex issue that defies simplifying answers that would place Russian/Soviet colonialism – and coloniality, which more precisely accounts for what is at stake – as simply synonymous with other Southern (Africa, Latin American, South/East Asian) experiences of European colonialism and coloniality (Tlostanova 2012).

5. In this case between scholars of various disciplines in and around Leipzig. There are some ‘transregional CRC’s, whereby ‘transregional’ refers nonetheless to intra-German collaboration.

6. As a rule of thumb, the researcher should conduct all research. Only where I have both content- and time-related difficulties in conducting research, I can use some of the money for local contracts, which however requires a justification of what would happen to the research if I did not use the money.

7. Some co-written articles might be accepted, depending on the regulations of the faculty within which the PhD is obtained.

8. In fact, especially leftist or anti-capitalist thought are demonised throughout postsocialist countries, which however is not a reason to understate their importance for research as North (2020) argues.

9. A map of the Community Economies Research Network (CERN) membership base with no affiliations in the ‘post-Soviet’ space can be accessed via https://www.communityeconomies.org/about/ce-research-network-cern

10. https://www.facebook.com/aramonoba/ has more than 70.000 followers in a country of little more than 3.5 million people.

11. Not all perspectives, only because they originate from the periphery, question the coloniality of knowledge underpinning much capitalocentric theorising. Such an essentializing perspective, in other words, would not sufficiently address the perils of nativism (Moosavi 2020, pp. 347–348).