To re-search literally means to “search again”, again and again. To continuously take things apart and push them into a new light. To keep looking beyond what appears to be known and thus engage in the co-construction of new realities.

How is that different from the act of “entrepreneuring”? One might argue that whereas the researcher is mainly in the business of “taking things apart”, the entrepreneur is defined by her capacity to “grab between” and “put things back together” in new ways. Put differently: research is mostly about deconstruction whereas entrepreneurship is more about reconstruction.

Both are in the construction business, however, and may simply focus on opposite sides of the same coin: the reconfiguration of taken-for-granted practices. So what happens if a researcher becomes an entrepreneur and the boundaries become ever more blurry?

Action research may then become “researched action” and participative observation “observing participation”. This opens up a new space for doing research, a space where it is acknowledged that researchers are always already slap-bang in the middle of the things they investigate, as Nigel Thrift put it once so succinctly, and take part in the co-construction of the realities that they seek to grasp.

We hence move into the realm of enactive research, away from epistemological curiosity towards ontological politics. Research has lost its innocence. Which brings forth the question as elaborated by Law & Urry (2004): if we actively co-create the realities that we seek to discover, which realities do we want to help bring into being? And what kind of methods would this imply?

_{This contribution is part of the “Food for Thought” series which seeks to trigger conversations about research, the Universe and everything in between. The fragment was written by Michel Bachmann who is a PhD student at the Institute for Organizational Psychology and researches the reassembling of a social entrepreneurship movement by actively taking part in the assembling of that movement. His reflection is thus guided by his daily experience of dancing along the hyphenated line in between researcher-entrepreneur. Drop him a line if you want to know more and join the conversation.}