The Feral MBA

Rich, Kate

Abstract

The Feral MBA investigates what taking business as medium for artistic inquiry might open up, both in relation to arts livelihoods and to the ways that business and economy are performed in other areas. This practice-based research is rooted in three decades of artistic practice in tactical media art, infrastructural and maintenance art. It is situated theoretically within the feminist, relational framework of diverse economies theory, and with reference to existing critiques of the MBA. The underlying premise of the thesis is that current modes of business-as-usual are fundamentally unsustainable. Intrinsic to the investigation is a recognition that the ideological shifts required to move beyond a profit and growth-centred economic model, while critically understood and imagined, are extremely difficult to materialise and maintain in everyday practice. This understanding draws inspiration from the ecological thinking of anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson who underlines that change needs to occur both at a philosophical and a habitual, behavioural level.

These directions come together in the project of establishing the Feral MBA, a training course in business for artists and others, concentrated on the performative effects of a prevailing business ideology and how this might be countered in practice. Two one-month pilot programmes for the Feral MBA were undertaken, in Hobart, Australia and Plymouth, UK. In the process a number of approaches were contextualised and explored, including performativity as a tactic for intervening in expected business narratives, active listening engaged through an experimental form of business coaching, and a series of hands-on making experiments with the materials of business. A significant recognition arising from these activities is the value of close listening as a generative, embodied means to step out of our daily business lives and practise alternatives with others. The work of the Feral MBA is to create a habitual container for this collective working out.

Eleven vignettes close the thesis, each looping back to ideas presented in the opening theoretical chapters. Rather than fixed conclusions or new business models they present a set of unstable, iterable tools and insights that start 'where we are' in diversity, locality and complexity, to apply to the difficult, subtle and variable process of becoming different business subjects.

Citation

Rich, K. The Feral MBA. (Thesis). University of the West of England. Retrieved from https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/9662675

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Jun 30, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: May 4, 2023
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/9662675
• Award Date: May 4, 2023