Business - Revision history

Juju: /* business */

2022-04-12T09:49:44Z

business

← Older revision		Revision as of 11:49, 12 April 2022
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	I would like to take up ''business'' as a term that regularly goes unexamined in the arts and humanities.<ref>Try scanning the texts of your favourite philosopher, artist, or activist thinker for business and you might see what I mean.</ref> Yet the idea of business could benefit from further attention, beyond its burnt-out definition of a site where entrepreneurs and workers transform resources into goods and services for profit. Some notions that I have scavenged from the margins of business discourse open up wormholes to new understandings. Management professor Martin Parker calls for an ‘insurgent entrepreneurship’ that could be critical, experimental, and playful with the economic status quo.<ref>‘Horizons of Possibility: Challenge Co-optation and Transformation’, in Martin Parker et al., eds., ''The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization'' (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 359–72.</ref> Activist lawyer Janelle Orsi asks what would happen if we redefined enterprise as ‘any productive activity that could bring us sustenance’?<ref>Janelle Orsi, ''Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies'' (Chicago, IL, American Bar Association, 2012).</ref> Social innovation scholar Warren Nilsson offers a gravitational vision of ‘unbound’ organization: an alternative geometry where business could have ‘a centre but no sides’, its activities coordinated through human intentions and relations, not formal structures and agendas.<ref>Warren Nilsson, ''Organization Unbound: The Spiritual Architecture of Organizations'' (2007). Available at organizationunbound.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02		<div class="no-indent">I would like to take up ''business'' as a term that regularly goes unexamined in the arts and humanities.<ref>Try scanning the texts of your favourite philosopher, artist, or activist thinker for business and you might see what I mean.</ref> Yet the idea of business could benefit from further attention, beyond its burnt-out definition of a site where entrepreneurs and workers transform resources into goods and services for profit. Some notions that I have scavenged from the margins of business discourse open up wormholes to new understandings. Management professor Martin Parker calls for an ‘insurgent entrepreneurship’ that could be critical, experimental, and playful with the economic status quo.<ref>‘Horizons of Possibility: Challenge Co-optation and Transformation’, in Martin Parker et al., eds., ''The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization'' (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 359–72.</ref> Activist lawyer Janelle Orsi asks what would happen if we redefined enterprise as ‘any productive activity that could bring us sustenance’?<ref>Janelle Orsi, ''Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies'' (Chicago, IL, American Bar Association, 2012).</ref> Social innovation scholar Warren Nilsson offers a gravitational vision of ‘unbound’ organization: an alternative geometry where business could have ‘a centre but no sides’, its activities coordinated through human intentions and relations, not formal structures and agendas.<ref>Warren Nilsson, ''Organization Unbound: The Spiritual Architecture of Organizations'' (2007). Available at organizationunbound.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02
	<br>/Organization-Unbound.pdf.</ref> And in the context of <mark class="c5">critical making</mark>, social entrepreneur Matthew Manos has speculated on ‘business as a medium for critical inquiry’ where the formats and materials of business could be refocused towards meaning-making rather than market-based success.<ref>Matthew Manos, ‘Business as a Medium’, in Garnet Hertz, ed., ''Critical Making'' ([Hollywood]: Telharmonium, 2012), pp. 27–32.</ref> A piñata of possibilities, yet the wider opportunity glimpsed in these statements is that business might not be a done deal, but open to interpretation.		<br>/Organization-Unbound.pdf.</ref> And in the context of <mark class="c5">critical making</mark>, social entrepreneur Matthew Manos has speculated on ‘business as a medium for critical inquiry’ where the formats and materials of business could be refocused towards meaning-making rather than market-based success.<ref>Matthew Manos, ‘Business as a Medium’, in Garnet Hertz, ed., ''Critical Making'' ([Hollywood]: Telharmonium, 2012), pp. 27–32.</ref> A piñata of possibilities, yet the wider opportunity glimpsed in these statements is that business might not be a done deal, but open to interpretation.</div>

	<span class="tighter">In my own case, I have been working as an artist with business as my medium and material for almost twenty years. My first foray into commerce was with Feral Trade, a sole trader grocery business operating across mixed terrain of art, social networks, and the commodity sphere since 2003 (for a more detailed description, see the entry for <mark class="c7">feral</mark> in this lexicon). I am also a part of the Cube Cola manufacturing partnership that produces and distributes an open-source cola worldwide. The cola is produced in our kitchen ‘lab’ and mailed out to customers in concentrate form; the recipe is freely shared. And I am a member of the accounts team at the Cube Microplex in Bristol, an all-volunteer-run arts venue that makes its living from the bar and the door takings. These endeavours are not proudly independent but rather the opposite, they make and maintain their interdependence with a constellation of other enterprises, from corporates to colleagues. These are the waste collectors, the regulatory agencies, the flavour industry giants, but they are also the corner shopkeepers, smallholder farms, feminist server collectives and <mark class="c7">diy</mark> shipping lines. To mention just a few like-minded endeavours, Company Drinks in London describe themselves as ‘art in the shape of a community drinks enterprise’.<ref>Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder, ‘How to reclaim the economy using artistic means: The case of Company Drinks’, in J.K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski, eds., ''The Handbook of Diverse Economies'' (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020), pp. 527–34.</ref> They run a yearly production cycle making and trading fizzy drinks in their community, a form of collectivity in art and economy they claim as a new and vital form of public space. And there is the Sail Cargo Alliance, a Europe-wide gathering of wind-powered sailing vessels, ships captains, and cargo brokers who are assembling a grassroots freight system that challenges not only the fuel source but the logic of the whole supply chain, down to what would be traded and why. Critically, these endeavours are not doing art or activism ‘about’ business but are out there in the world doing business for real.</span>		<span class="tighter">In my own case, I have been working as an artist with business as my medium and material for almost twenty years. My first foray into commerce was with Feral Trade, a sole trader grocery business operating across mixed terrain of art, social networks, and the commodity sphere since 2003 (for a more detailed description, see the entry for <mark class="c7">feral</mark> in this lexicon). I am also a part of the Cube Cola manufacturing partnership that produces and distributes an open-source cola worldwide. The cola is produced in our kitchen ‘lab’ and mailed out to customers in concentrate form; the recipe is freely shared. And I am a member of the accounts team at the Cube Microplex in Bristol, an all-volunteer-run arts venue that makes its living from the bar and the door takings. These endeavours are not proudly independent but rather the opposite, they make and maintain their interdependence with a constellation of other enterprises, from corporates to colleagues. These are the waste collectors, the regulatory agencies, the flavour industry giants, but they are also the corner shopkeepers, smallholder farms, feminist server collectives and <mark class="c7">diy</mark> shipping lines. To mention just a few like-minded endeavours, Company Drinks in London describe themselves as ‘art in the shape of a community drinks enterprise’.<ref>Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder, ‘How to reclaim the economy using artistic means: The case of Company Drinks’, in J.K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski, eds., ''The Handbook of Diverse Economies'' (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020), pp. 527–34.</ref> They run a yearly production cycle making and trading fizzy drinks in their community, a form of collectivity in art and economy they claim as a new and vital form of public space. And there is the Sail Cargo Alliance, a Europe-wide gathering of wind-powered sailing vessels, ships captains, and cargo brokers who are assembling a grassroots freight system that challenges not only the fuel source but the logic of the whole supply chain, down to what would be traded and why. Critically, these endeavours are not doing art or activism ‘about’ business but are out there in the world doing business for real.</span>

Juju: /* business */

2022-04-07T13:21:40Z

business

← Older revision		Revision as of 15:21, 7 April 2022
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	<span class="author">Kate Rich</span>		<span class="author">Kate Rich</span>

	[[File:MM_Pub21_V1_KR_A_Business.jpg\|\|thumb\|Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.]]		[[File:MM_Pub21_V1_KR_A_Business.jpg\|\|thumb\|]]
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	I would like to take up ''~~<mark class="c4">~~business~~</span>~~'' as a term that regularly goes unexamined in the arts and humanities.<ref>Try scanning the texts of your favourite philosopher, artist, or activist thinker for business and you might see what I mean.</ref> Yet the idea of business could benefit from further attention, beyond its burnt-out definition of a site where entrepreneurs and workers transform resources into goods and services for profit. Some notions that I have scavenged from the margins of business discourse open up wormholes to new understandings. Management professor Martin Parker calls for an ‘insurgent entrepreneurship’ that could be critical, experimental, and playful with the economic status quo.<ref>‘Horizons of Possibility: Challenge Co-optation and Transformation’, in Martin Parker et al., eds., ''The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization'' (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 359–72.</ref> Activist lawyer Janelle Orsi asks what would happen if we redefined enterprise as ‘any productive activity that could bring us sustenance’?<ref>Janelle Orsi, ''Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies'' (Chicago, IL, American Bar Association, 2012).</ref> Social innovation scholar Warren Nilsson offers a gravitational vision of ‘unbound’ organization: an alternative geometry where business could have ‘a centre but no sides’, its activities coordinated through human intentions and relations, not formal structures and agendas.<ref>Warren Nilsson, ''Organization Unbound: The Spiritual Architecture of Organizations'' (2007). Available at organizationunbound.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Organization-Unbound.pdf.</ref> And in the context of <mark class="c5">critical making</mark>, social entrepreneur Matthew Manos has speculated on ‘business as a medium for critical inquiry’ where the formats and materials of business could be refocused towards meaning-making rather than market-based success.<ref>Matthew Manos, ‘Business as a Medium’, in Garnet Hertz, ed., ''Critical Making'' ([Hollywood]: Telharmonium, 2012), pp. 27–32.</ref> A piñata of possibilities, yet the wider opportunity glimpsed in these statements is that business might not be a done deal, but open to interpretation.		I would like to take up ''business'' as a term that regularly goes unexamined in the arts and humanities.<ref>Try scanning the texts of your favourite philosopher, artist, or activist thinker for business and you might see what I mean.</ref> Yet the idea of business could benefit from further attention, beyond its burnt-out definition of a site where entrepreneurs and workers transform resources into goods and services for profit. Some notions that I have scavenged from the margins of business discourse open up wormholes to new understandings. Management professor Martin Parker calls for an ‘insurgent entrepreneurship’ that could be critical, experimental, and playful with the economic status quo.<ref>‘Horizons of Possibility: Challenge Co-optation and Transformation’, in Martin Parker et al., eds., ''The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization'' (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 359–72.</ref> Activist lawyer Janelle Orsi asks what would happen if we redefined enterprise as ‘any productive activity that could bring us sustenance’?<ref>Janelle Orsi, ''Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies'' (Chicago, IL, American Bar Association, 2012).</ref> Social innovation scholar Warren Nilsson offers a gravitational vision of ‘unbound’ organization: an alternative geometry where business could have ‘a centre but no sides’, its activities coordinated through human intentions and relations, not formal structures and agendas.<ref>Warren Nilsson, ''Organization Unbound: The Spiritual Architecture of Organizations'' (2007). Available at organizationunbound.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02
			<br>/Organization-Unbound.pdf.</ref> And in the context of <mark class="c5">critical making</mark>, social entrepreneur Matthew Manos has speculated on ‘business as a medium for critical inquiry’ where the formats and materials of business could be refocused towards meaning-making rather than market-based success.<ref>Matthew Manos, ‘Business as a Medium’, in Garnet Hertz, ed., ''Critical Making'' ([Hollywood]: Telharmonium, 2012), pp. 27–32.</ref> A piñata of possibilities, yet the wider opportunity glimpsed in these statements is that business might not be a done deal, but open to interpretation.

	<span class="tighter">In my own case, I have been working as an artist with business as my medium and material for almost twenty years. My first foray into commerce was with ~~<mark class="c7">feral</mark>~~ Trade, a sole trader grocery business operating across mixed terrain of art, social networks, and the commodity sphere since 2003 (for a more detailed description, see the entry for <mark class="c7">feral</mark> in this lexicon). I am also a part of the Cube Cola manufacturing partnership that produces and distributes an open-source cola worldwide. The cola is produced in our kitchen ‘lab’ and mailed out to customers in concentrate form; the recipe is freely shared. And I am a member of the accounts team at the Cube Microplex in Bristol, an all-volunteer-run arts venue that makes its living from the bar and the door takings. These endeavours are not proudly independent but rather the opposite, they make and maintain their interdependence with a constellation of other enterprises, from corporates to colleagues. These are the waste collectors, the regulatory agencies, the flavour industry giants, but they are also the corner shopkeepers, smallholder farms, feminist server collectives and <mark class="c7">diy</mark> shipping lines. To mention just a few like-minded endeavours, Company Drinks in London describe themselves as ‘art in the shape of a community drinks enterprise’.<ref>Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder, ‘How to reclaim the economy using artistic means: The case of Company Drinks’, in J.K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski, eds., ''The Handbook of Diverse Economies'' (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020), pp. 527–34.</ref> They run a yearly production cycle making and trading fizzy drinks in their community, a form of collectivity in art and economy they claim as a new and vital form of public space. And there is the Sail Cargo Alliance, a Europe-wide gathering of wind-powered sailing vessels, ships captains, and cargo brokers who are assembling a grassroots freight system that challenges not only the fuel source but the logic of the whole supply chain, down to what would be traded and why. Critically, these endeavours are not doing art or activism ‘about’ business but are out there in the world doing business for real.</span>		<span class="tighter">In my own case, I have been working as an artist with business as my medium and material for almost twenty years. My first foray into commerce was with Feral Trade, a sole trader grocery business operating across mixed terrain of art, social networks, and the commodity sphere since 2003 (for a more detailed description, see the entry for <mark class="c7">feral</mark> in this lexicon). I am also a part of the Cube Cola manufacturing partnership that produces and distributes an open-source cola worldwide. The cola is produced in our kitchen ‘lab’ and mailed out to customers in concentrate form; the recipe is freely shared. And I am a member of the accounts team at the Cube Microplex in Bristol, an all-volunteer-run arts venue that makes its living from the bar and the door takings. These endeavours are not proudly independent but rather the opposite, they make and maintain their interdependence with a constellation of other enterprises, from corporates to colleagues. These are the waste collectors, the regulatory agencies, the flavour industry giants, but they are also the corner shopkeepers, smallholder farms, feminist server collectives and <mark class="c7">diy</mark> shipping lines. To mention just a few like-minded endeavours, Company Drinks in London describe themselves as ‘art in the shape of a community drinks enterprise’.<ref>Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder, ‘How to reclaim the economy using artistic means: The case of Company Drinks’, in J.K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski, eds., ''The Handbook of Diverse Economies'' (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020), pp. 527–34.</ref> They run a yearly production cycle making and trading fizzy drinks in their community, a form of collectivity in art and economy they claim as a new and vital form of public space. And there is the Sail Cargo Alliance, a Europe-wide gathering of wind-powered sailing vessels, ships captains, and cargo brokers who are assembling a grassroots freight system that challenges not only the fuel source but the logic of the whole supply chain, down to what would be traded and why. Critically, these endeavours are not doing art or activism ‘about’ business but are out there in the world doing business for real.</span>

	<span class="tighter">Taking business as a stage and site for experiments in ‘surviving well together’ (in the words of feminist economist J.K. Gibson-Graham),<ref>J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy, ''Take Back the ~~eEonomy~~: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).</ref> the kind that might open up routes into other possible worlds, may seem counter-intuitive. Those working in the arts or education may have experienced being swept up or perhaps dragged under by a tide of business vocabulary and values, encapsulated in the bonanza of the Creative Industries that reconfigures creativity as a driver of economic growth. At the same time, the uneasy covenant that ‘business as usual’ would maintain a habitable planet has unarguably failed. Yet these fractures and fissures also point to an uncommon potential. business is widely understood and accessible, it operates in and across wildly different collectives, shapes, and scales. It can act as a Trojan horse, an avatar or exoskeleton in which to navigate this hostile yet contestable space that we hazily call ‘the economy’. The sail cargo captains are negotiating with commercial harbours to bring their vessels into port alongside the container ships. The artist-led drinks companies are merging their recipes to produce a trans-national cola with the potential to take down a stickily secretive, world-dominating incumbent. An artist-anarchist farming partnership finds a route through the welfare system to secure the Farm Household Allowance, an income that will bankroll their agriculture experiments for years to come.</span>		<span class="tighter">Taking business as a stage and site for experiments in ‘surviving well together’ (in the words of feminist economist J.K. Gibson-Graham),<ref>J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy, ''Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).</ref> the kind that might open up routes into other possible worlds, may seem counter-intuitive. Those working in the arts or education may have experienced being swept up or perhaps dragged under by a tide of business vocabulary and values, encapsulated in the bonanza of the Creative Industries that reconfigures creativity as a driver of economic growth. At the same time, the uneasy covenant that ‘business as usual’ would maintain a habitable planet has unarguably failed. Yet these fractures and fissures also point to an uncommon potential. business is widely understood and accessible, it operates in and across wildly different collectives, shapes, and scales. It can act as a Trojan horse, an avatar or exoskeleton in which to navigate this hostile yet contestable space that we hazily call ‘the economy’. The sail cargo captains are negotiating with commercial harbours to bring their vessels into port alongside the container ships. The artist-led drinks companies are merging their recipes to produce a trans-national cola with the potential to take down a stickily secretive, world-dominating incumbent. An artist-anarchist farming partnership finds a route through the welfare system to secure the Farm Household Allowance, an income that will bankroll their agriculture experiments for years to come.</span>

	In the case of ~~<mark class="c7">feral</mark>~~ Trade, a few years back I was fortunate enough to be raided by Trading Standards, the UK consumer protection agency. Trading Standards investigates commercial entities that trade outside the law, they have more powers than the police and can for example enter your home without a warrant. They spent hours swarming the ~~<mark class="c7">feral</mark>~~ Trade website, then cornered me for an interview. After lengthy negotiations, finding no consumer as such to protect—these are peer-to-peer transactions, negotiated entirely through social routes and relations—I received a kind of de facto, state-sanctioned permission to continue trading, in this grey zone of business that ~~<mark class="c7">feral</mark>~~ Trade has made its home. A tiny island of regulatory indeterminacy, where the relationship between the commercial and the personal is blurred to the point that the law gets a headache.		In the case of Feral Trade, a few years back I was fortunate enough to be raided by Trading Standards, the UK consumer protection agency. Trading Standards investigates commercial entities that trade outside the law, they have more powers than the police and can for example enter your home without a warrant. They spent hours swarming the Feral Trade website, then cornered me for an interview. After lengthy negotiations, finding no consumer as such to protect—these are peer-to-peer transactions, negotiated entirely through social routes and relations—I received a kind of de facto, state-sanctioned permission to continue trading, in this grey zone of business that Feral Trade has made its home. A tiny island of regulatory indeterminacy, where the relationship between the commercial and the personal is blurred to the point that the law gets a headache.

	<span class="tighter">These are wildly local and contingent examples; they are not models for anything. They are all also imbricated, co-produced and co-dependent with a host of other elements and effects, including the systems they contest. Yet this is also the point. The prospect of business could not be more salient, viewed from the burning debris of a torched economy. We all already are, have, or are in a unit of livelihood, or many—to annex the words of artist Joseph Beuys: ‘everyone is a business’! The challenge, and the potential, is to bring our day-to-day subsistence in line with the meanings we want to make. business could be a vehicle for doing that.</span>		<span class="tighter">These are wildly local and contingent examples; they are not models for anything. They are all also imbricated, co-produced and co-dependent with a host of other elements and effects, including the systems they contest. Yet this is also the point. The prospect of business could not be more salient, viewed from the burning debris of a torched economy. We all already are, have, or are in a unit of livelihood, or many—to annex the words of artist Joseph Beuys: ‘everyone is a business’! The challenge, and the potential, is to bring our day-to-day subsistence in line with the meanings we want to make. business could be a vehicle for doing that.</span>

Juju: /* business */

2022-03-28T12:57:26Z

business

← Older revision		Revision as of 14:57, 28 March 2022
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	I would like to take up business as a term that regularly goes unexamined in the arts and humanities.<ref>Try scanning the texts of your favourite philosopher, artist, or activist thinker for business and you might see what I mean.</ref> Yet the idea of business could benefit from further attention, beyond its burnt-out definition of a site where entrepreneurs and workers transform resources into goods and services for profit. Some notions that I have scavenged from the margins of business discourse open up wormholes to new understandings. Management professor Martin Parker calls for an ‘insurgent entrepreneurship’ that could be critical, experimental, and playful with the economic status quo.<ref>‘Horizons of Possibility: Challenge Co-optation and Transformation’, in Martin Parker et al., eds., ''The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization'' (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 359–72.</ref> Activist lawyer Janelle Orsi asks what would happen if we redefined enterprise as ‘any productive activity that could bring us sustenance’?<ref>Janelle Orsi, ''Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies'' (Chicago, IL, American Bar Association, 2012).</ref> Social innovation scholar Warren Nilsson offers a gravitational vision of ‘unbound’ organization: an alternative geometry where business could have ‘a centre but no sides’, its activities coordinated through human intentions and relations, not formal structures and agendas.<ref>Warren Nilsson, ''Organization Unbound: The Spiritual Architecture of Organizations'' (2007). Available at organizationunbound.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Organization-Unbound.pdf.</ref> And in the context of <mark class="c5">critical making</mark>, social entrepreneur Matthew Manos has speculated on ‘business as a medium for critical inquiry’ where the formats and materials of business could be refocused towards meaning-making rather than market-based success.<ref>Matthew Manos, ‘Business as a Medium’, in Garnet Hertz, ed., ''Critical Making'' ([Hollywood]: Telharmonium, 2012), pp. 27–32.</ref> A piñata of possibilities, yet the wider opportunity glimpsed in these statements is that business might not be a done deal, but open to interpretation.		I would like to take up ''<mark class="c4">business</span>'' as a term that regularly goes unexamined in the arts and humanities.<ref>Try scanning the texts of your favourite philosopher, artist, or activist thinker for business and you might see what I mean.</ref> Yet the idea of business could benefit from further attention, beyond its burnt-out definition of a site where entrepreneurs and workers transform resources into goods and services for profit. Some notions that I have scavenged from the margins of business discourse open up wormholes to new understandings. Management professor Martin Parker calls for an ‘insurgent entrepreneurship’ that could be critical, experimental, and playful with the economic status quo.<ref>‘Horizons of Possibility: Challenge Co-optation and Transformation’, in Martin Parker et al., eds., ''The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization'' (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 359–72.</ref> Activist lawyer Janelle Orsi asks what would happen if we redefined enterprise as ‘any productive activity that could bring us sustenance’?<ref>Janelle Orsi, ''Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies'' (Chicago, IL, American Bar Association, 2012).</ref> Social innovation scholar Warren Nilsson offers a gravitational vision of ‘unbound’ organization: an alternative geometry where business could have ‘a centre but no sides’, its activities coordinated through human intentions and relations, not formal structures and agendas.<ref>Warren Nilsson, ''Organization Unbound: The Spiritual Architecture of Organizations'' (2007). Available at organizationunbound.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Organization-Unbound.pdf.</ref> And in the context of <mark class="c5">critical making</mark>, social entrepreneur Matthew Manos has speculated on ‘business as a medium for critical inquiry’ where the formats and materials of business could be refocused towards meaning-making rather than market-based success.<ref>Matthew Manos, ‘Business as a Medium’, in Garnet Hertz, ed., ''Critical Making'' ([Hollywood]: Telharmonium, 2012), pp. 27–32.</ref> A piñata of possibilities, yet the wider opportunity glimpsed in these statements is that business might not be a done deal, but open to interpretation.

	<span class="tighter">In my own case, I have been working as an artist with business as my medium and material for almost twenty years. My first foray into commerce was with <mark class="c7">feral</mark> Trade, a sole trader grocery business operating across mixed terrain of art, social networks, and the commodity sphere since 2003 (for a more detailed description, see the entry for <mark class="c7">feral</mark> in this lexicon). I am also a part of the Cube Cola manufacturing partnership that produces and distributes an open-source cola worldwide. The cola is produced in our kitchen ‘lab’ and mailed out to customers in concentrate form; the recipe is freely shared. And I am a member of the accounts team at the Cube Microplex in Bristol, an all-volunteer-run arts venue that makes its living from the bar and the door takings. These endeavours are not proudly independent but rather the opposite, they make and maintain their interdependence with a constellation of other enterprises, from corporates to colleagues. These are the waste collectors, the regulatory agencies, the flavour industry giants, but they are also the corner shopkeepers, smallholder farms, feminist server collectives and <mark class="c7">diy</mark> shipping lines. To mention just a few like-minded endeavours, Company Drinks in London describe themselves as ‘art in the shape of a community drinks enterprise’.<ref>Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder, ‘How to reclaim the economy using artistic means: The case of Company Drinks’, in J.K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski, eds., ''The Handbook of Diverse Economies'' (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020), pp. 527–34.</ref> They run a yearly production cycle making and trading fizzy drinks in their community, a form of collectivity in art and economy they claim as a new and vital form of public space. And there is the Sail Cargo Alliance, a Europe-wide gathering of wind-powered sailing vessels, ships captains, and cargo brokers who are assembling a grassroots freight system that challenges not only the fuel source but the logic of the whole supply chain, down to what would be traded and why. Critically, these endeavours are not doing art or activism ‘about’ business but are out there in the world doing business for real.</span>		<span class="tighter">In my own case, I have been working as an artist with business as my medium and material for almost twenty years. My first foray into commerce was with <mark class="c7">feral</mark> Trade, a sole trader grocery business operating across mixed terrain of art, social networks, and the commodity sphere since 2003 (for a more detailed description, see the entry for <mark class="c7">feral</mark> in this lexicon). I am also a part of the Cube Cola manufacturing partnership that produces and distributes an open-source cola worldwide. The cola is produced in our kitchen ‘lab’ and mailed out to customers in concentrate form; the recipe is freely shared. And I am a member of the accounts team at the Cube Microplex in Bristol, an all-volunteer-run arts venue that makes its living from the bar and the door takings. These endeavours are not proudly independent but rather the opposite, they make and maintain their interdependence with a constellation of other enterprises, from corporates to colleagues. These are the waste collectors, the regulatory agencies, the flavour industry giants, but they are also the corner shopkeepers, smallholder farms, feminist server collectives and <mark class="c7">diy</mark> shipping lines. To mention just a few like-minded endeavours, Company Drinks in London describe themselves as ‘art in the shape of a community drinks enterprise’.<ref>Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder, ‘How to reclaim the economy using artistic means: The case of Company Drinks’, in J.K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski, eds., ''The Handbook of Diverse Economies'' (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020), pp. 527–34.</ref> They run a yearly production cycle making and trading fizzy drinks in their community, a form of collectivity in art and economy they claim as a new and vital form of public space. And there is the Sail Cargo Alliance, a Europe-wide gathering of wind-powered sailing vessels, ships captains, and cargo brokers who are assembling a grassroots freight system that challenges not only the fuel source but the logic of the whole supply chain, down to what would be traded and why. Critically, these endeavours are not doing art or activism ‘about’ business but are out there in the world doing business for real.</span>

Juju: /* business */

2022-03-23T12:23:44Z

business

← Older revision		Revision as of 14:23, 23 March 2022
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	I would like to take up business as a term that regularly goes unexamined in the arts and humanities.<ref>Try scanning the texts of your favourite philosopher, artist, or activist thinker for business and you might see what I mean.</ref> Yet the idea of business could benefit from further attention, beyond its burnt-out definition of a site where entrepreneurs and workers transform resources into goods and services for profit. Some notions that I have scavenged from the margins of business discourse open up wormholes to new understandings. Management professor Martin Parker calls for an ‘insurgent entrepreneurship’ that could be critical, experimental, and playful with the economic status quo.<ref>‘Horizons of Possibility: Challenge Co-optation and Transformation’, in Martin Parker et al., eds., ''The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization'' (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 359–72.</ref> Activist lawyer Janelle Orsi asks what would happen if we redefined enterprise as ‘any productive activity that could bring us sustenance’?<ref>Janelle Orsi, ''Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies'' (Chicago, IL, American Bar Association, 2012).</ref> Social innovation scholar Warren Nilsson offers a gravitational vision of ‘unbound’ organization: an alternative geometry where business could have ‘a centre but no sides’, its activities coordinated through human intentions and relations, not formal structures and agendas.<ref>Warren Nilsson, ''Organization Unbound: The Spiritual Architecture of Organizations'' (2007). Available at organizationunbound.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Organization-Unbound.pdf.</ref> And in the context of <mark class="c5">critical making</mark>, social entrepreneur Matthew Manos has speculated on ‘business as a medium for critical inquiry’ where the formats and materials of business could be refocused towards meaning-making rather than market-based success.<ref>Matthew Manos, ‘Business as a Medium’, in Garnet Hertz, ed., ''Critical Making'' ([Hollywood]: Telharmonium, 2012), pp. 27–32.</ref> A piñata of possibilities, yet the wider opportunity glimpsed in these statements is that business might not be a done deal, but open to interpretation.		I would like to take up business as a term that regularly goes unexamined in the arts and humanities.<ref>Try scanning the texts of your favourite philosopher, artist, or activist thinker for business and you might see what I mean.</ref> Yet the idea of business could benefit from further attention, beyond its burnt-out definition of a site where entrepreneurs and workers transform resources into goods and services for profit. Some notions that I have scavenged from the margins of business discourse open up wormholes to new understandings. Management professor Martin Parker calls for an ‘insurgent entrepreneurship’ that could be critical, experimental, and playful with the economic status quo.<ref>‘Horizons of Possibility: Challenge Co-optation and Transformation’, in Martin Parker et al., eds., ''The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization'' (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 359–72.</ref> Activist lawyer Janelle Orsi asks what would happen if we redefined enterprise as ‘any productive activity that could bring us sustenance’?<ref>Janelle Orsi, ''Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies'' (Chicago, IL, American Bar Association, 2012).</ref> Social innovation scholar Warren Nilsson offers a gravitational vision of ‘unbound’ organization: an alternative geometry where business could have ‘a centre but no sides’, its activities coordinated through human intentions and relations, not formal structures and agendas.<ref>Warren Nilsson, ''Organization Unbound: The Spiritual Architecture of Organizations'' (2007). Available at organizationunbound.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Organization-Unbound.pdf.</ref> And in the context of <mark class="c5">critical making</mark>, social entrepreneur Matthew Manos has speculated on ‘business as a medium for critical inquiry’ where the formats and materials of business could be refocused towards meaning-making rather than market-based success.<ref>Matthew Manos, ‘Business as a Medium’, in Garnet Hertz, ed., ''Critical Making'' ([Hollywood]: Telharmonium, 2012), pp. 27–32.</ref> A piñata of possibilities, yet the wider opportunity glimpsed in these statements is that business might not be a done deal, but open to interpretation.

	In my own case, I have been working as an artist with business as my medium and material for almost twenty years. My first foray into commerce was with <mark class="c7">feral</mark> Trade, a sole trader grocery business operating across mixed terrain of art, social networks, and the commodity sphere since 2003 (for a more detailed description, see the entry for <mark class="c7">feral</mark> in this lexicon). I am also a part of the Cube Cola manufacturing partnership that produces and distributes an open-source cola worldwide. The cola is produced in our kitchen ‘lab’ and mailed out to customers in concentrate form; the recipe is freely shared. And I am a member of the accounts team at the Cube Microplex in Bristol, an all-volunteer-run arts venue that makes its living from the bar and the door takings. These endeavours are not proudly independent but rather the opposite, they make and maintain their interdependence with a constellation of other enterprises, from corporates to colleagues. These are the waste collectors, the regulatory agencies, the flavour industry giants, but they are also the corner shopkeepers, smallholder farms, feminist server collectives and <mark class="c7">diy</mark> shipping lines. To mention just a few like-minded endeavours, Company Drinks in London describe themselves as ‘art in the shape of a community drinks enterprise’.<ref>Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder, ‘How to reclaim the economy using artistic means: The case of Company Drinks’, in J.K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski, eds., ''The Handbook of Diverse Economies'' (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020), pp. 527–34.</ref> They run a yearly production cycle making and trading fizzy drinks in their community, a form of collectivity in art and economy they claim as a new and vital form of public space. And there is the Sail Cargo Alliance, a Europe-wide gathering of wind-powered sailing vessels, ships captains, and cargo brokers who are assembling a grassroots freight system that challenges not only the fuel source but the logic of the whole supply chain, down to what would be traded and why. Critically, these endeavours are not doing art or activism ‘about’ business but are out there in the world doing business for real.		<span class="tighter">In my own case, I have been working as an artist with business as my medium and material for almost twenty years. My first foray into commerce was with <mark class="c7">feral</mark> Trade, a sole trader grocery business operating across mixed terrain of art, social networks, and the commodity sphere since 2003 (for a more detailed description, see the entry for <mark class="c7">feral</mark> in this lexicon). I am also a part of the Cube Cola manufacturing partnership that produces and distributes an open-source cola worldwide. The cola is produced in our kitchen ‘lab’ and mailed out to customers in concentrate form; the recipe is freely shared. And I am a member of the accounts team at the Cube Microplex in Bristol, an all-volunteer-run arts venue that makes its living from the bar and the door takings. These endeavours are not proudly independent but rather the opposite, they make and maintain their interdependence with a constellation of other enterprises, from corporates to colleagues. These are the waste collectors, the regulatory agencies, the flavour industry giants, but they are also the corner shopkeepers, smallholder farms, feminist server collectives and <mark class="c7">diy</mark> shipping lines. To mention just a few like-minded endeavours, Company Drinks in London describe themselves as ‘art in the shape of a community drinks enterprise’.<ref>Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder, ‘How to reclaim the economy using artistic means: The case of Company Drinks’, in J.K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski, eds., ''The Handbook of Diverse Economies'' (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020), pp. 527–34.</ref> They run a yearly production cycle making and trading fizzy drinks in their community, a form of collectivity in art and economy they claim as a new and vital form of public space. And there is the Sail Cargo Alliance, a Europe-wide gathering of wind-powered sailing vessels, ships captains, and cargo brokers who are assembling a grassroots freight system that challenges not only the fuel source but the logic of the whole supply chain, down to what would be traded and why. Critically, these endeavours are not doing art or activism ‘about’ business but are out there in the world doing business for real.</span>

	Taking business as a stage and site for experiments in ‘surviving well together’ (in the words of feminist economist J.K. Gibson-Graham),<ref>J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy, ''Take Back the eEonomy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).</ref> the kind that might open up routes into other possible worlds, may seem counter-intuitive. Those working in the arts or education may have experienced being swept up or perhaps dragged under by a tide of business vocabulary and values, encapsulated in the bonanza of the Creative Industries that reconfigures creativity as a driver of economic growth. At the same time, the uneasy covenant that ‘business as usual’ would maintain a habitable planet has unarguably failed. Yet these fractures and fissures also point to an uncommon potential. business is widely understood and accessible, it operates in and across wildly different collectives, shapes, and scales. It can act as a Trojan horse, an avatar or exoskeleton in which to navigate this hostile yet contestable space that we hazily call ‘the economy’. The sail cargo captains are negotiating with commercial harbours to bring their vessels into port alongside the container ships. The artist-led drinks companies are merging their recipes to produce a trans-national cola with the potential to take down a stickily secretive, world-dominating incumbent. An artist-anarchist farming partnership finds a route through the welfare system to secure the Farm Household Allowance, an income that will bankroll their agriculture experiments for years to come.		<span class="tighter">Taking business as a stage and site for experiments in ‘surviving well together’ (in the words of feminist economist J.K. Gibson-Graham),<ref>J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy, ''Take Back the eEonomy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).</ref> the kind that might open up routes into other possible worlds, may seem counter-intuitive. Those working in the arts or education may have experienced being swept up or perhaps dragged under by a tide of business vocabulary and values, encapsulated in the bonanza of the Creative Industries that reconfigures creativity as a driver of economic growth. At the same time, the uneasy covenant that ‘business as usual’ would maintain a habitable planet has unarguably failed. Yet these fractures and fissures also point to an uncommon potential. business is widely understood and accessible, it operates in and across wildly different collectives, shapes, and scales. It can act as a Trojan horse, an avatar or exoskeleton in which to navigate this hostile yet contestable space that we hazily call ‘the economy’. The sail cargo captains are negotiating with commercial harbours to bring their vessels into port alongside the container ships. The artist-led drinks companies are merging their recipes to produce a trans-national cola with the potential to take down a stickily secretive, world-dominating incumbent. An artist-anarchist farming partnership finds a route through the welfare system to secure the Farm Household Allowance, an income that will bankroll their agriculture experiments for years to come.</span>

	In the case of <mark class="c7">feral</mark> Trade, a few years back I was fortunate enough to be raided by Trading Standards, the UK consumer protection agency. Trading Standards investigates commercial entities that trade outside the law, they have more powers than the police and can for example enter your home without a warrant. They spent hours swarming the <mark class="c7">feral</mark> Trade website, then cornered me for an interview. After lengthy negotiations, finding no consumer as such to protect—these are peer-to-peer transactions, negotiated entirely through social routes and relations—I received a kind of de facto, state-sanctioned permission to continue trading, in this grey zone of business that <mark class="c7">feral</mark> Trade has made its home. A tiny island of regulatory indeterminacy, where the relationship between the commercial and the personal is blurred to the point that the law gets a headache.		In the case of <mark class="c7">feral</mark> Trade, a few years back I was fortunate enough to be raided by Trading Standards, the UK consumer protection agency. Trading Standards investigates commercial entities that trade outside the law, they have more powers than the police and can for example enter your home without a warrant. They spent hours swarming the <mark class="c7">feral</mark> Trade website, then cornered me for an interview. After lengthy negotiations, finding no consumer as such to protect—these are peer-to-peer transactions, negotiated entirely through social routes and relations—I received a kind of de facto, state-sanctioned permission to continue trading, in this grey zone of business that <mark class="c7">feral</mark> Trade has made its home. A tiny island of regulatory indeterminacy, where the relationship between the commercial and the personal is blurred to the point that the law gets a headache.

	These are wildly local and contingent examples; they are not models for anything. They are all also imbricated, co-produced and co-dependent with a host of other elements and effects, including the systems they contest. Yet this is also the point. The prospect of business could not be more salient, viewed from the burning debris of a torched economy. We all already are, have, or are in a unit of livelihood, or many—to annex the words of artist Joseph Beuys: ‘everyone is a business’! The challenge, and the potential, is to bring our day-to-day subsistence in line with the meanings we want to make. business could be a vehicle for doing that.		<span class="tighter">These are wildly local and contingent examples; they are not models for anything. They are all also imbricated, co-produced and co-dependent with a host of other elements and effects, including the systems they contest. Yet this is also the point. The prospect of business could not be more salient, viewed from the burning debris of a torched economy. We all already are, have, or are in a unit of livelihood, or many—to annex the words of artist Joseph Beuys: ‘everyone is a business’! The challenge, and the potential, is to bring our day-to-day subsistence in line with the meanings we want to make. business could be a vehicle for doing that.</span>

Heerko: /* business */

2022-03-21T13:20:50Z

business

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	I would like to take up business as a term that regularly goes unexamined in the arts and humanities.<ref>Try scanning the texts of your favourite philosopher, artist, or activist thinker for business and you might see what I mean.</ref> Yet the idea of business could benefit from further attention, beyond its burnt-out definition of a site where entrepreneurs and workers transform resources into goods and services for profit. Some notions that I have scavenged from the margins of business discourse open up wormholes to new understandings. Management professor Martin Parker calls for an ‘insurgent entrepreneurship’ that could be critical, experimental, and playful with the economic status quo.<ref>‘Horizons of Possibility: Challenge Co-optation and Transformation’, in Martin Parker et al., eds., ''The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization'' (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 359–72.</ref> Activist lawyer Janelle Orsi asks what would happen if we redefined enterprise as ‘any productive activity that could bring us sustenance’?<ref>Janelle Orsi, ''Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies'' (Chicago, IL, American Bar Association, 2012).</ref> Social innovation scholar Warren Nilsson offers a gravitational vision of ‘unbound’ organization: an alternative geometry where business could have ‘a centre but no sides’, its activities coordinated through human intentions and relations, not formal structures and agendas.<ref>Warren Nilsson, ''Organization Unbound: The Spiritual Architecture of Organizations'' (2007). Available at organizationunbound.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Organization-Unbound.pdf.</ref> And in the context of critical ~~making↵~~, social entrepreneur Matthew Manos has speculated on ‘business as a medium for critical inquiry’ where the formats and materials of business could be refocused towards meaning-making rather than market-based success.<ref>Matthew Manos, ‘Business as a Medium’, in Garnet Hertz, ed., ''Critical Making'' ([Hollywood]: Telharmonium, 2012), pp. 27–32.</ref> A piñata of possibilities, yet the wider opportunity glimpsed in these statements is that business might not be a done deal, but open to interpretation.		I would like to take up business as a term that regularly goes unexamined in the arts and humanities.<ref>Try scanning the texts of your favourite philosopher, artist, or activist thinker for business and you might see what I mean.</ref> Yet the idea of business could benefit from further attention, beyond its burnt-out definition of a site where entrepreneurs and workers transform resources into goods and services for profit. Some notions that I have scavenged from the margins of business discourse open up wormholes to new understandings. Management professor Martin Parker calls for an ‘insurgent entrepreneurship’ that could be critical, experimental, and playful with the economic status quo.<ref>‘Horizons of Possibility: Challenge Co-optation and Transformation’, in Martin Parker et al., eds., ''The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization'' (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 359–72.</ref> Activist lawyer Janelle Orsi asks what would happen if we redefined enterprise as ‘any productive activity that could bring us sustenance’?<ref>Janelle Orsi, ''Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies'' (Chicago, IL, American Bar Association, 2012).</ref> Social innovation scholar Warren Nilsson offers a gravitational vision of ‘unbound’ organization: an alternative geometry where business could have ‘a centre but no sides’, its activities coordinated through human intentions and relations, not formal structures and agendas.<ref>Warren Nilsson, ''Organization Unbound: The Spiritual Architecture of Organizations'' (2007). Available at organizationunbound.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Organization-Unbound.pdf.</ref> And in the context of <mark class="c5">critical making</mark>, social entrepreneur Matthew Manos has speculated on ‘business as a medium for critical inquiry’ where the formats and materials of business could be refocused towards meaning-making rather than market-based success.<ref>Matthew Manos, ‘Business as a Medium’, in Garnet Hertz, ed., ''Critical Making'' ([Hollywood]: Telharmonium, 2012), pp. 27–32.</ref> A piñata of possibilities, yet the wider opportunity glimpsed in these statements is that business might not be a done deal, but open to interpretation.

	In my own case, I have been working as an artist with business as my medium and material for almost twenty years. My first foray into commerce was with ~~feral↵~~ Trade, a sole trader grocery business operating across mixed terrain of art, social networks, and the commodity sphere since 2003 (for a more detailed description, see the entry for ~~feral↵~~ in this lexicon). I am also a part of the Cube Cola manufacturing partnership that produces and distributes an open-source cola worldwide. The cola is produced in our kitchen ‘lab’ and mailed out to customers in concentrate form; the recipe is freely shared. And I am a member of the accounts team at the Cube Microplex in Bristol, an all-volunteer-run arts venue that makes its living from the bar and the door takings. These endeavours are not proudly independent but rather the opposite, they make and maintain their interdependence with a constellation of other enterprises, from corporates to colleagues. These are the waste collectors, the regulatory agencies, the flavour industry giants, but they are also the corner shopkeepers, smallholder farms, feminist server collectives and ~~diy↵~~ shipping lines. To mention just a few like-minded endeavours, Company Drinks in London describe themselves as ‘art in the shape of a community drinks enterprise’.<ref>Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder, ‘How to reclaim the economy using artistic means: The case of Company Drinks’, in J.K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski, eds., ''The Handbook of Diverse Economies'' (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020), pp. 527–34.</ref> They run a yearly production cycle making and trading fizzy drinks in their community, a form of collectivity in art and economy they claim as a new and vital form of public space. And there is the Sail Cargo Alliance, a Europe-wide gathering of wind-powered sailing vessels, ships captains, and cargo brokers who are assembling a grassroots freight system that challenges not only the fuel source but the logic of the whole supply chain, down to what would be traded and why. Critically, these endeavours are not doing art or activism ‘about’ business but are out there in the world doing business for real.		In my own case, I have been working as an artist with business as my medium and material for almost twenty years. My first foray into commerce was with <mark class="c7">feral</mark> Trade, a sole trader grocery business operating across mixed terrain of art, social networks, and the commodity sphere since 2003 (for a more detailed description, see the entry for <mark class="c7">feral</mark> in this lexicon). I am also a part of the Cube Cola manufacturing partnership that produces and distributes an open-source cola worldwide. The cola is produced in our kitchen ‘lab’ and mailed out to customers in concentrate form; the recipe is freely shared. And I am a member of the accounts team at the Cube Microplex in Bristol, an all-volunteer-run arts venue that makes its living from the bar and the door takings. These endeavours are not proudly independent but rather the opposite, they make and maintain their interdependence with a constellation of other enterprises, from corporates to colleagues. These are the waste collectors, the regulatory agencies, the flavour industry giants, but they are also the corner shopkeepers, smallholder farms, feminist server collectives and <mark class="c7">diy</mark> shipping lines. To mention just a few like-minded endeavours, Company Drinks in London describe themselves as ‘art in the shape of a community drinks enterprise’.<ref>Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder, ‘How to reclaim the economy using artistic means: The case of Company Drinks’, in J.K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski, eds., ''The Handbook of Diverse Economies'' (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020), pp. 527–34.</ref> They run a yearly production cycle making and trading fizzy drinks in their community, a form of collectivity in art and economy they claim as a new and vital form of public space. And there is the Sail Cargo Alliance, a Europe-wide gathering of wind-powered sailing vessels, ships captains, and cargo brokers who are assembling a grassroots freight system that challenges not only the fuel source but the logic of the whole supply chain, down to what would be traded and why. Critically, these endeavours are not doing art or activism ‘about’ business but are out there in the world doing business for real.

	Taking business as a stage and site for experiments in ‘surviving well together’ (in the words of feminist economist J.K. Gibson-Graham),<ref>J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy, ''Take Back the eEonomy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).</ref> the kind that might open up routes into other possible worlds, may seem counter-intuitive. Those working in the arts or education may have experienced being swept up or perhaps dragged under by a tide of business vocabulary and values, encapsulated in the bonanza of the Creative Industries that reconfigures creativity as a driver of economic growth. At the same time, the uneasy covenant that ‘business as usual’ would maintain a habitable planet has unarguably failed. Yet these fractures and fissures also point to an uncommon potential. business is widely understood and accessible, it operates in and across wildly different collectives, shapes, and scales. It can act as a Trojan horse, an avatar or exoskeleton in which to navigate this hostile yet contestable space that we hazily call ‘the economy’. The sail cargo captains are negotiating with commercial harbours to bring their vessels into port alongside the container ships. The artist-led drinks companies are merging their recipes to produce a trans-national cola with the potential to take down a stickily secretive, world-dominating incumbent. An artist-anarchist farming partnership finds a route through the welfare system to secure the Farm Household Allowance, an income that will bankroll their agriculture experiments for years to come.		Taking business as a stage and site for experiments in ‘surviving well together’ (in the words of feminist economist J.K. Gibson-Graham),<ref>J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy, ''Take Back the eEonomy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).</ref> the kind that might open up routes into other possible worlds, may seem counter-intuitive. Those working in the arts or education may have experienced being swept up or perhaps dragged under by a tide of business vocabulary and values, encapsulated in the bonanza of the Creative Industries that reconfigures creativity as a driver of economic growth. At the same time, the uneasy covenant that ‘business as usual’ would maintain a habitable planet has unarguably failed. Yet these fractures and fissures also point to an uncommon potential. business is widely understood and accessible, it operates in and across wildly different collectives, shapes, and scales. It can act as a Trojan horse, an avatar or exoskeleton in which to navigate this hostile yet contestable space that we hazily call ‘the economy’. The sail cargo captains are negotiating with commercial harbours to bring their vessels into port alongside the container ships. The artist-led drinks companies are merging their recipes to produce a trans-national cola with the potential to take down a stickily secretive, world-dominating incumbent. An artist-anarchist farming partnership finds a route through the welfare system to secure the Farm Household Allowance, an income that will bankroll their agriculture experiments for years to come.

	In the case of ~~feral↵~~ Trade, a few years back I was fortunate enough to be raided by Trading Standards, the UK consumer protection agency. Trading Standards investigates commercial entities that trade outside the law, they have more powers than the police and can for example enter your home without a warrant. They spent hours swarming the ~~feral↵~~ Trade website, then cornered me for an interview. After lengthy negotiations, finding no consumer as such to protect—these are peer-to-peer transactions, negotiated entirely through social routes and relations—I received a kind of de facto, state-sanctioned permission to continue trading, in this grey zone of business that ~~feral↵~~ Trade has made its home. A tiny island of regulatory indeterminacy, where the relationship between the commercial and the personal is blurred to the point that the law gets a headache.		In the case of <mark class="c7">feral</mark> Trade, a few years back I was fortunate enough to be raided by Trading Standards, the UK consumer protection agency. Trading Standards investigates commercial entities that trade outside the law, they have more powers than the police and can for example enter your home without a warrant. They spent hours swarming the <mark class="c7">feral</mark> Trade website, then cornered me for an interview. After lengthy negotiations, finding no consumer as such to protect—these are peer-to-peer transactions, negotiated entirely through social routes and relations—I received a kind of de facto, state-sanctioned permission to continue trading, in this grey zone of business that <mark class="c7">feral</mark> Trade has made its home. A tiny island of regulatory indeterminacy, where the relationship between the commercial and the personal is blurred to the point that the law gets a headache.

	These are wildly local and contingent examples; they are not models for anything. They are all also imbricated, co-produced and co-dependent with a host of other elements and effects, including the systems they contest. Yet this is also the point. The prospect of business could not be more salient, viewed from the burning debris of a torched economy. We all already are, have, or are in a unit of livelihood, or many—to annex the words of artist Joseph Beuys: ‘everyone is a business’! The challenge, and the potential, is to bring our day-to-day subsistence in line with the meanings we want to make. business could be a vehicle for doing that.		These are wildly local and contingent examples; they are not models for anything. They are all also imbricated, co-produced and co-dependent with a host of other elements and effects, including the systems they contest. Yet this is also the point. The prospect of business could not be more salient, viewed from the burning debris of a torched economy. We all already are, have, or are in a unit of livelihood, or many—to annex the words of artist Joseph Beuys: ‘everyone is a business’! The challenge, and the potential, is to bring our day-to-day subsistence in line with the meanings we want to make. business could be a vehicle for doing that.

	~~<references />~~

Hd-onions at 12:19, 8 March 2022

2022-03-08T12:19:28Z

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	[[File:MM_Pub21_V1_KR_A_Business.jpg\|\|thumb\|Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.]]		[[File:MM_Pub21_V1_KR_A_Business.jpg\|\|thumb\|Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.]]
			<span class="page-break"> </span>

	I would like to take up business as a term that regularly goes unexamined in the arts and humanities.<ref>Try scanning the texts of your favourite philosopher, artist, or activist thinker for business and you might see what I mean.</ref> Yet the idea of business could benefit from further attention, beyond its burnt-out definition of a site where entrepreneurs and workers transform resources into goods and services for profit. Some notions that I have scavenged from the margins of business discourse open up wormholes to new understandings. Management professor Martin Parker calls for an ‘insurgent entrepreneurship’ that could be critical, experimental, and playful with the economic status quo.<ref>‘Horizons of Possibility: Challenge Co-optation and Transformation’, in Martin Parker et al., eds., ''The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization'' (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 359–72.</ref> Activist lawyer Janelle Orsi asks what would happen if we redefined enterprise as ‘any productive activity that could bring us sustenance’?<ref>Janelle Orsi, ''Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies'' (Chicago, IL, American Bar Association, 2012).</ref> Social innovation scholar Warren Nilsson offers a gravitational vision of ‘unbound’ organization: an alternative geometry where business could have ‘a centre but no sides’, its activities coordinated through human intentions and relations, not formal structures and agendas.<ref>Warren Nilsson, ''Organization Unbound: The Spiritual Architecture of Organizations'' (2007). Available at organizationunbound.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Organization-Unbound.pdf.</ref> And in the context of critical making↵, social entrepreneur Matthew Manos has speculated on ‘business as a medium for critical inquiry’ where the formats and materials of business could be refocused towards meaning-making rather than market-based success.<ref>Matthew Manos, ‘Business as a Medium’, in Garnet Hertz, ed., ''Critical Making'' ([Hollywood]: Telharmonium, 2012), pp. 27–32.</ref> A piñata of possibilities, yet the wider opportunity glimpsed in these statements is that business might not be a done deal, but open to interpretation.		I would like to take up business as a term that regularly goes unexamined in the arts and humanities.<ref>Try scanning the texts of your favourite philosopher, artist, or activist thinker for business and you might see what I mean.</ref> Yet the idea of business could benefit from further attention, beyond its burnt-out definition of a site where entrepreneurs and workers transform resources into goods and services for profit. Some notions that I have scavenged from the margins of business discourse open up wormholes to new understandings. Management professor Martin Parker calls for an ‘insurgent entrepreneurship’ that could be critical, experimental, and playful with the economic status quo.<ref>‘Horizons of Possibility: Challenge Co-optation and Transformation’, in Martin Parker et al., eds., ''The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization'' (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 359–72.</ref> Activist lawyer Janelle Orsi asks what would happen if we redefined enterprise as ‘any productive activity that could bring us sustenance’?<ref>Janelle Orsi, ''Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies'' (Chicago, IL, American Bar Association, 2012).</ref> Social innovation scholar Warren Nilsson offers a gravitational vision of ‘unbound’ organization: an alternative geometry where business could have ‘a centre but no sides’, its activities coordinated through human intentions and relations, not formal structures and agendas.<ref>Warren Nilsson, ''Organization Unbound: The Spiritual Architecture of Organizations'' (2007). Available at organizationunbound.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Organization-Unbound.pdf.</ref> And in the context of critical making↵, social entrepreneur Matthew Manos has speculated on ‘business as a medium for critical inquiry’ where the formats and materials of business could be refocused towards meaning-making rather than market-based success.<ref>Matthew Manos, ‘Business as a Medium’, in Garnet Hertz, ed., ''Critical Making'' ([Hollywood]: Telharmonium, 2012), pp. 27–32.</ref> A piñata of possibilities, yet the wider opportunity glimpsed in these statements is that business might not be a done deal, but open to interpretation.

Hd-onions: /* business */

2022-03-08T12:18:45Z

business

← Older revision		Revision as of 14:18, 8 March 2022
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	==business==		==business==
	<span class="author">Kate Rich</span>		<span class="author">Kate Rich</span>

			[[File:MM_Pub21_V1_KR_A_Business.jpg\|\|thumb\|Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.]]

	I would like to take up business as a term that regularly goes unexamined in the arts and humanities.<ref>Try scanning the texts of your favourite philosopher, artist, or activist thinker for business and you might see what I mean.</ref> Yet the idea of business could benefit from further attention, beyond its burnt-out definition of a site where entrepreneurs and workers transform resources into goods and services for profit. Some notions that I have scavenged from the margins of business discourse open up wormholes to new understandings. Management professor Martin Parker calls for an ‘insurgent entrepreneurship’ that could be critical, experimental, and playful with the economic status quo.<ref>‘Horizons of Possibility: Challenge Co-optation and Transformation’, in Martin Parker et al., eds., ''The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization'' (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 359–72.</ref> Activist lawyer Janelle Orsi asks what would happen if we redefined enterprise as ‘any productive activity that could bring us sustenance’?<ref>Janelle Orsi, ''Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies'' (Chicago, IL, American Bar Association, 2012).</ref> Social innovation scholar Warren Nilsson offers a gravitational vision of ‘unbound’ organization: an alternative geometry where business could have ‘a centre but no sides’, its activities coordinated through human intentions and relations, not formal structures and agendas.<ref>Warren Nilsson, ''Organization Unbound: The Spiritual Architecture of Organizations'' (2007). Available at organizationunbound.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Organization-Unbound.pdf.</ref> And in the context of critical making↵, social entrepreneur Matthew Manos has speculated on ‘business as a medium for critical inquiry’ where the formats and materials of business could be refocused towards meaning-making rather than market-based success.<ref>Matthew Manos, ‘Business as a Medium’, in Garnet Hertz, ed., ''Critical Making'' ([Hollywood]: Telharmonium, 2012), pp. 27–32.</ref> A piñata of possibilities, yet the wider opportunity glimpsed in these statements is that business might not be a done deal, but open to interpretation.		I would like to take up business as a term that regularly goes unexamined in the arts and humanities.<ref>Try scanning the texts of your favourite philosopher, artist, or activist thinker for business and you might see what I mean.</ref> Yet the idea of business could benefit from further attention, beyond its burnt-out definition of a site where entrepreneurs and workers transform resources into goods and services for profit. Some notions that I have scavenged from the margins of business discourse open up wormholes to new understandings. Management professor Martin Parker calls for an ‘insurgent entrepreneurship’ that could be critical, experimental, and playful with the economic status quo.<ref>‘Horizons of Possibility: Challenge Co-optation and Transformation’, in Martin Parker et al., eds., ''The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization'' (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 359–72.</ref> Activist lawyer Janelle Orsi asks what would happen if we redefined enterprise as ‘any productive activity that could bring us sustenance’?<ref>Janelle Orsi, ''Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies'' (Chicago, IL, American Bar Association, 2012).</ref> Social innovation scholar Warren Nilsson offers a gravitational vision of ‘unbound’ organization: an alternative geometry where business could have ‘a centre but no sides’, its activities coordinated through human intentions and relations, not formal structures and agendas.<ref>Warren Nilsson, ''Organization Unbound: The Spiritual Architecture of Organizations'' (2007). Available at organizationunbound.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Organization-Unbound.pdf.</ref> And in the context of critical making↵, social entrepreneur Matthew Manos has speculated on ‘business as a medium for critical inquiry’ where the formats and materials of business could be refocused towards meaning-making rather than market-based success.<ref>Matthew Manos, ‘Business as a Medium’, in Garnet Hertz, ed., ''Critical Making'' ([Hollywood]: Telharmonium, 2012), pp. 27–32.</ref> A piñata of possibilities, yet the wider opportunity glimpsed in these statements is that business might not be a done deal, but open to interpretation.

Hd-onions at 11:04, 3 March 2022

2022-03-03T11:04:50Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 13:04, 3 March 2022
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	<span class="author">Kate Rich</span>		<span class="author">Kate Rich</span>

	I would like to take up ~~business↵~~ as a term that regularly goes unexamined in the arts and humanities.<ref>Try scanning the texts of your favourite philosopher, artist, or activist thinker for ~~business↵~~ and you might see what I mean.</ref> Yet the idea of ~~business↵~~ could benefit from further attention, beyond its burnt-out definition of a site where entrepreneurs and workers transform resources into goods and services for profit. Some notions that I have scavenged from the margins of ~~business↵~~ discourse open up wormholes to new understandings. Management professor Martin Parker calls for an ‘insurgent entrepreneurship’ that could be critical, experimental, and playful with the economic status quo.<ref>‘Horizons of Possibility: Challenge Co-optation and Transformation’, in Martin Parker et al., eds., ''The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization'' (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 359–72.</ref> Activist lawyer Janelle Orsi asks what would happen if we redefined enterprise as ‘any productive activity that could bring us sustenance’?<ref>Janelle Orsi, ''Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies'' (Chicago, IL, American Bar Association, 2012).</ref> Social innovation scholar Warren Nilsson offers a gravitational vision of ‘unbound’ organization: an alternative geometry where ~~business↵~~ could have ‘a centre but no sides’, its activities coordinated through human intentions and relations, not formal structures and agendas.<ref>Warren Nilsson, ''Organization Unbound: The Spiritual Architecture of Organizations'' (2007). Available at organizationunbound.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Organization-Unbound.pdf.</ref> And in the context of critical making↵, social entrepreneur Matthew Manos has speculated on ~~‘business↵~~ as a medium for critical inquiry’ where the formats and materials of ~~business↵~~ could be refocused towards meaning-making rather than market-based success.<ref>Matthew Manos, ‘Business as a Medium’, in Garnet Hertz, ed., ''Critical Making'' ([Hollywood]: Telharmonium, 2012), pp. 27–32.</ref> A piñata of possibilities, yet the wider opportunity glimpsed in these statements is that ~~business↵~~ might not be a done deal, but open to interpretation.		I would like to take up business as a term that regularly goes unexamined in the arts and humanities.<ref>Try scanning the texts of your favourite philosopher, artist, or activist thinker for business and you might see what I mean.</ref> Yet the idea of business could benefit from further attention, beyond its burnt-out definition of a site where entrepreneurs and workers transform resources into goods and services for profit. Some notions that I have scavenged from the margins of business discourse open up wormholes to new understandings. Management professor Martin Parker calls for an ‘insurgent entrepreneurship’ that could be critical, experimental, and playful with the economic status quo.<ref>‘Horizons of Possibility: Challenge Co-optation and Transformation’, in Martin Parker et al., eds., ''The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization'' (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 359–72.</ref> Activist lawyer Janelle Orsi asks what would happen if we redefined enterprise as ‘any productive activity that could bring us sustenance’?<ref>Janelle Orsi, ''Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies'' (Chicago, IL, American Bar Association, 2012).</ref> Social innovation scholar Warren Nilsson offers a gravitational vision of ‘unbound’ organization: an alternative geometry where business could have ‘a centre but no sides’, its activities coordinated through human intentions and relations, not formal structures and agendas.<ref>Warren Nilsson, ''Organization Unbound: The Spiritual Architecture of Organizations'' (2007). Available at organizationunbound.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Organization-Unbound.pdf.</ref> And in the context of critical making↵, social entrepreneur Matthew Manos has speculated on ‘business as a medium for critical inquiry’ where the formats and materials of business could be refocused towards meaning-making rather than market-based success.<ref>Matthew Manos, ‘Business as a Medium’, in Garnet Hertz, ed., ''Critical Making'' ([Hollywood]: Telharmonium, 2012), pp. 27–32.</ref> A piñata of possibilities, yet the wider opportunity glimpsed in these statements is that business might not be a done deal, but open to interpretation.

	In my own case, I have been working as an artist with ~~business↵~~ as my medium and material for almost twenty years. My first foray into commerce was with feral↵ Trade, a sole trader grocery ~~business↵~~ operating across mixed terrain of art, social networks, and the commodity sphere since 2003 (for a more detailed description, see the entry for feral↵ in this lexicon). I am also a part of the Cube Cola manufacturing partnership that produces and distributes an open-source cola worldwide. The cola is produced in our kitchen ‘lab’ and mailed out to customers in concentrate form; the recipe is freely shared. And I am a member of the accounts team at the Cube Microplex in Bristol, an all-volunteer-run arts venue that makes its living from the bar and the door takings. These endeavours are not proudly independent but rather the opposite, they make and maintain their interdependence with a constellation of other enterprises, from corporates to colleagues. These are the waste collectors, the regulatory agencies, the flavour industry giants, but they are also the corner shopkeepers, smallholder farms, feminist server collectives and diy↵ shipping lines. To mention just a few like-minded endeavours, Company Drinks in London describe themselves as ‘art in the shape of a community drinks enterprise’.<ref>Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder, ‘How to reclaim the economy using artistic means: The case of Company Drinks’, in J.K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski, eds., ''The Handbook of Diverse Economies'' (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020), pp. 527–34.</ref> They run a yearly production cycle making and trading fizzy drinks in their community, a form of collectivity in art and economy they claim as a new and vital form of public space. And there is the Sail Cargo Alliance, a Europe-wide gathering of wind-powered sailing vessels, ships captains, and cargo brokers who are assembling a grassroots freight system that challenges not only the fuel source but the logic of the whole supply chain, down to what would be traded and why. Critically, these endeavours are not doing art or activism ‘about’ ~~business↵~~ but are out there in the world doing ~~business↵~~ for real.		In my own case, I have been working as an artist with business as my medium and material for almost twenty years. My first foray into commerce was with feral↵ Trade, a sole trader grocery business operating across mixed terrain of art, social networks, and the commodity sphere since 2003 (for a more detailed description, see the entry for feral↵ in this lexicon). I am also a part of the Cube Cola manufacturing partnership that produces and distributes an open-source cola worldwide. The cola is produced in our kitchen ‘lab’ and mailed out to customers in concentrate form; the recipe is freely shared. And I am a member of the accounts team at the Cube Microplex in Bristol, an all-volunteer-run arts venue that makes its living from the bar and the door takings. These endeavours are not proudly independent but rather the opposite, they make and maintain their interdependence with a constellation of other enterprises, from corporates to colleagues. These are the waste collectors, the regulatory agencies, the flavour industry giants, but they are also the corner shopkeepers, smallholder farms, feminist server collectives and diy↵ shipping lines. To mention just a few like-minded endeavours, Company Drinks in London describe themselves as ‘art in the shape of a community drinks enterprise’.<ref>Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder, ‘How to reclaim the economy using artistic means: The case of Company Drinks’, in J.K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski, eds., ''The Handbook of Diverse Economies'' (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020), pp. 527–34.</ref> They run a yearly production cycle making and trading fizzy drinks in their community, a form of collectivity in art and economy they claim as a new and vital form of public space. And there is the Sail Cargo Alliance, a Europe-wide gathering of wind-powered sailing vessels, ships captains, and cargo brokers who are assembling a grassroots freight system that challenges not only the fuel source but the logic of the whole supply chain, down to what would be traded and why. Critically, these endeavours are not doing art or activism ‘about’ business but are out there in the world doing business for real.

	Taking ~~business↵~~ as a stage and site for experiments in ‘surviving well together’ (in the words of feminist economist J.K. Gibson-Graham),<ref>J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy, ''Take Back the eEonomy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).</ref> the kind that might open up routes into other possible worlds, may seem counter-intuitive. Those working in the arts or education may have experienced being swept up or perhaps dragged under by a tide of ~~business↵~~ vocabulary and values, encapsulated in the bonanza of the Creative Industries that reconfigures creativity as a driver of economic growth. At the same time, the uneasy covenant that ~~‘business↵~~ as usual’ would maintain a habitable planet has unarguably failed. Yet these fractures and fissures also point to an uncommon potential. ~~business↵~~ is widely understood and accessible, it operates in and across wildly different collectives, shapes, and scales. It can act as a Trojan horse, an avatar or exoskeleton in which to navigate this hostile yet contestable space that we hazily call ‘the economy’. The sail cargo captains are negotiating with commercial harbours to bring their vessels into port alongside the container ships. The artist-led drinks companies are merging their recipes to produce a trans-national cola with the potential to take down a stickily secretive, world-dominating incumbent. An artist-anarchist farming partnership finds a route through the welfare system to secure the Farm Household Allowance, an income that will bankroll their agriculture experiments for years to come.		Taking business as a stage and site for experiments in ‘surviving well together’ (in the words of feminist economist J.K. Gibson-Graham),<ref>J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy, ''Take Back the eEonomy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).</ref> the kind that might open up routes into other possible worlds, may seem counter-intuitive. Those working in the arts or education may have experienced being swept up or perhaps dragged under by a tide of business vocabulary and values, encapsulated in the bonanza of the Creative Industries that reconfigures creativity as a driver of economic growth. At the same time, the uneasy covenant that ‘business as usual’ would maintain a habitable planet has unarguably failed. Yet these fractures and fissures also point to an uncommon potential. business is widely understood and accessible, it operates in and across wildly different collectives, shapes, and scales. It can act as a Trojan horse, an avatar or exoskeleton in which to navigate this hostile yet contestable space that we hazily call ‘the economy’. The sail cargo captains are negotiating with commercial harbours to bring their vessels into port alongside the container ships. The artist-led drinks companies are merging their recipes to produce a trans-national cola with the potential to take down a stickily secretive, world-dominating incumbent. An artist-anarchist farming partnership finds a route through the welfare system to secure the Farm Household Allowance, an income that will bankroll their agriculture experiments for years to come.

	In the case of feral↵ Trade, a few years back I was fortunate enough to be raided by Trading Standards, the UK consumer protection agency. Trading Standards investigates commercial entities that trade outside the law, they have more powers than the police and can for example enter your home without a warrant. They spent hours swarming the feral↵ Trade website, then cornered me for an interview. After lengthy negotiations, finding no consumer as such to protect—these are peer-to-peer transactions, negotiated entirely through social routes and relations—I received a kind of de facto, state-sanctioned permission to continue trading, in this grey zone of ~~business↵~~ that feral↵ Trade has made its home. A tiny island of regulatory indeterminacy, where the relationship between the commercial and the personal is blurred to the point that the law gets a headache.		In the case of feral↵ Trade, a few years back I was fortunate enough to be raided by Trading Standards, the UK consumer protection agency. Trading Standards investigates commercial entities that trade outside the law, they have more powers than the police and can for example enter your home without a warrant. They spent hours swarming the feral↵ Trade website, then cornered me for an interview. After lengthy negotiations, finding no consumer as such to protect—these are peer-to-peer transactions, negotiated entirely through social routes and relations—I received a kind of de facto, state-sanctioned permission to continue trading, in this grey zone of business that feral↵ Trade has made its home. A tiny island of regulatory indeterminacy, where the relationship between the commercial and the personal is blurred to the point that the law gets a headache.

	These are wildly local and contingent examples; they are not models for anything. They are all also imbricated, co-produced and co-dependent with a host of other elements and effects, including the systems they contest. Yet this is also the point. The prospect of ~~business↵~~ could not be more salient, viewed from the burning debris of a torched economy. We all already are, have, or are in a unit of livelihood, or many—to annex the words of artist Joseph Beuys: ‘everyone is a ~~business↵’~~! The challenge, and the potential, is to bring our day-to-day subsistence in line with the meanings we want to make. ~~business↵~~ could be a vehicle for doing that.		These are wildly local and contingent examples; they are not models for anything. They are all also imbricated, co-produced and co-dependent with a host of other elements and effects, including the systems they contest. Yet this is also the point. The prospect of business could not be more salient, viewed from the burning debris of a torched economy. We all already are, have, or are in a unit of livelihood, or many—to annex the words of artist Joseph Beuys: ‘everyone is a business’! The challenge, and the potential, is to bring our day-to-day subsistence in line with the meanings we want to make. business could be a vehicle for doing that.

	<references />		<references />

Hd-onions: /* business↵ */

2022-03-03T10:14:53Z

business↵

← Older revision		Revision as of 12:14, 3 March 2022
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	==~~business↵~~==		==business==
	<span class="author">Kate Rich</span>		<span class="author">Kate Rich</span>

Heerko: /* business↵ */

2022-03-01T20:12:49Z

business↵

← Older revision		Revision as of 22:12, 1 March 2022
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	==business↵==		==business↵==
	Kate Rich		<span class="author">Kate Rich</span>

	I would like to take up business↵ as a term that regularly goes unexamined in the arts and humanities.<ref>Try scanning the texts of your favourite philosopher, artist, or activist thinker for business↵ and you might see what I mean.</ref> Yet the idea of business↵ could benefit from further attention, beyond its burnt-out definition of a site where entrepreneurs and workers transform resources into goods and services for profit. Some notions that I have scavenged from the margins of business↵ discourse open up wormholes to new understandings. Management professor Martin Parker calls for an ‘insurgent entrepreneurship’ that could be critical, experimental, and playful with the economic status quo.<ref>‘Horizons of Possibility: Challenge Co-optation and Transformation’, in Martin Parker et al., eds., ''The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization'' (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 359–72.</ref> Activist lawyer Janelle Orsi asks what would happen if we redefined enterprise as ‘any productive activity that could bring us sustenance’?<ref>Janelle Orsi, ''Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies'' (Chicago, IL, American Bar Association, 2012).</ref> Social innovation scholar Warren Nilsson offers a gravitational vision of ‘unbound’ organization: an alternative geometry where business↵ could have ‘a centre but no sides’, its activities coordinated through human intentions and relations, not formal structures and agendas.<ref>Warren Nilsson, ''Organization Unbound: The Spiritual Architecture of Organizations'' (2007). Available at organizationunbound.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Organization-Unbound.pdf.</ref> And in the context of critical making↵, social entrepreneur Matthew Manos has speculated on ‘business↵ as a medium for critical inquiry’ where the formats and materials of business↵ could be refocused towards meaning-making rather than market-based success.<ref>Matthew Manos, ‘Business as a Medium’, in Garnet Hertz, ed., ''Critical Making'' ([Hollywood]: Telharmonium, 2012), pp. 27–32.</ref> A piñata of possibilities, yet the wider opportunity glimpsed in these statements is that business↵ might not be a done deal, but open to interpretation.		I would like to take up business↵ as a term that regularly goes unexamined in the arts and humanities.<ref>Try scanning the texts of your favourite philosopher, artist, or activist thinker for business↵ and you might see what I mean.</ref> Yet the idea of business↵ could benefit from further attention, beyond its burnt-out definition of a site where entrepreneurs and workers transform resources into goods and services for profit. Some notions that I have scavenged from the margins of business↵ discourse open up wormholes to new understandings. Management professor Martin Parker calls for an ‘insurgent entrepreneurship’ that could be critical, experimental, and playful with the economic status quo.<ref>‘Horizons of Possibility: Challenge Co-optation and Transformation’, in Martin Parker et al., eds., ''The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization'' (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 359–72.</ref> Activist lawyer Janelle Orsi asks what would happen if we redefined enterprise as ‘any productive activity that could bring us sustenance’?<ref>Janelle Orsi, ''Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies'' (Chicago, IL, American Bar Association, 2012).</ref> Social innovation scholar Warren Nilsson offers a gravitational vision of ‘unbound’ organization: an alternative geometry where business↵ could have ‘a centre but no sides’, its activities coordinated through human intentions and relations, not formal structures and agendas.<ref>Warren Nilsson, ''Organization Unbound: The Spiritual Architecture of Organizations'' (2007). Available at organizationunbound.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Organization-Unbound.pdf.</ref> And in the context of critical making↵, social entrepreneur Matthew Manos has speculated on ‘business↵ as a medium for critical inquiry’ where the formats and materials of business↵ could be refocused towards meaning-making rather than market-based success.<ref>Matthew Manos, ‘Business as a Medium’, in Garnet Hertz, ed., ''Critical Making'' ([Hollywood]: Telharmonium, 2012), pp. 27–32.</ref> A piñata of possibilities, yet the wider opportunity glimpsed in these statements is that business↵ might not be a done deal, but open to interpretation.