Guest editorial: The space-times of decision making

By way of an extended introduction to a theme issue on the space times of decision making, this paper pursues two objectives. We first review some of the ways in which geographers-and especially economic geographers-have examined decision making over the past decades, showing that previous engagements with the decision are informed primarily by thinking from economics, psychology, and certain strands of sociology. Drawing on a wider range of intellectual resources, we then outline eight propositions that might guide future research by geographers and others into the space-times of decision making. These propositions help us to move beyond the idea that the decision is a singular moment abstracted from the context within which it takes place and undertaken by a discrete actor or set of actors. Instead the decision is understood as a differentiated, affectively registered, transformative, and ongoing actualisation of potential against a horizon of undecidability in which past, present, and future fold together in complex ways. A number of research questions follow from the outlined propositions: these pertain to the sites and techniques of decision making, its relationships to the governing of life, and our own decision-making practices as academics.