In a time when traditional management often feels mechanistic, competitive, and extractive, a growing movement is reimagining the purpose of organizations. Instead of focusing narrowly on efficiency and profit, some pioneering companies are embracing a radically different vision: Humanistic management. Our recent research, published in the Journal of Management Studies, explores how organizations across the globe are weaving performative fabrics of practices that realize humanistic ideas—dignity, freedom, well-being, and community—in tangible ways. 

Humanistic management proposes a bold idea: that organizations should center people, not profits, and measure success by the flourishing they foster. Humanistic management is for-people management, not for profit management. But how can organizations make these ideals real, not just aspirational? Our study dives deep into this question by examining three organizations—located in Germany, China, and the United States—that have successfully embedded humanistic management practices into their everyday work. 

From Abstract Ideas to Lived Realities 

At a German manufacturing company, Eye-Level Management dismantles rigid hierarchies, promoting freedom and responsibility at work. In a Chinese semiconductor firm, Humanistic Education infuses traditional wisdom and personal growth into daily operations, nurturing employee happiness. In the United States, a bakery’s Open Hiring practice restores dignity by offering jobs to anyone willing to work, without background checks or interviews. 

Realizing alternative visions of management requires more than vision statements or codes of ethics. It demands continuous action, relational commitment, and practices that embody values. Drawing on the lens of performativity—the idea that realities are enacted and stabilized through practices—we uncovered that the organizations in our study succeed by weaving together three types of practices: 

• Humanizing practices that directly express humanistic values like dignity and compassion. 

• Seeding practices that prepare the ground by unsettling old assumptions and theorizing new possibilities. 

• Nurturing practices that support and sustain human-centered practices through motivation, cohesion, and scaffolding structures. 

Rather than isolated interventions, these practices form interconnected webs—performative fabrics—that continuously generate and reinforce the social realities of human flourishing. 

The Power of Fabrics: Building Resilient Realities 

One of our key insights is that flourishing is not achieved through isolated best practices, but through the cumulative, reinforcing effects of interwoven practices. These fabrics produce four types of positive realization effects: 

1. Potentialities – new possibilities become imaginable. For example, a small group of confidents around the managing director of Allsafe make radically non-hierarchical Eye-Level Management realistic and doable. 

2. Anomalies – small pioneering pockets of humanistic practices emerge. Good-Ark middle managers engage in pioneering away-from-work retreats to experiment with Humanistic Education. 

3. Normalities – practices spread and become the new normal within an organization. At Greyston Open Hiring, removing commonplace barriers to employment, expands beyond bakery jobs and gets adjusted to work across varieties of roles and hierarchies. 

4. Transferabilities – practices migrate across organizations and sectors, expanding their impact. Open Hiring, Humanistic Education, and Eye-level Management migrate to be practiced in varieties of other organizations, regions, industries, and sectors. 

By carefully studying these dynamics, we contribute to understanding how desirable futures are made real, not just envisioned. 

Why This Matters Now 

As crises of inequality, climate change, and mental health deepen, the world needs management models that serve the common good, not just shareholders. Our study provides concrete evidence that rehumanizing management is not naïve or utopian—it is already happening. However, sustaining and scaling such efforts requires understanding the fabric dynamics that undergird them: the ways practices interweave, stabilize, defend, and evolve over time. 

If we want to mainstream management for flourishing, we must move beyond slogans and focus on practicing values into being—weaving organizational realities thread by thread, interaction by interaction. 

Practical Implications: Lessons for Scholars and Leaders 

Our findings offer a fresh lens for both research and practice. 

For scholars, they suggest that the realization of alternative management ideas cannot be understood by studying single practices in isolation. Future research should examine relational constellations of practices and the dynamic processes that sustain humanistic realities over time. 

For leaders and practitioners, the message is clear: 

• Human-centered transformation is possible, but it requires more than aspirational ideas. If you want to realize an idea, it requires continuously building diverse practices around it and with it. 

• Invest in weaving interconnected practices that nurture dignity, well-being, and freedom. Your day-to-day practicing, that is consistent with and nurtured by a humanistic idea, as tedious as it may seem at times, is what makes ideas a reality. It is a Marathon, not a sprint… and it is never over. 

• Prepare for ongoing maintenance—humanistic realities are fragile and must be defended and reformed over time. Especially in times like these where attacking humanistic ideas and practices has yet once again become en vogue, your continuous defensive and adaptive work is essential. 

If organizations are to become platforms for flourishing rather than sites of alienation, leaders must become weavers of humanistic fabrics—paying attention to the dynamic interplay of practices that bring new futures into being. 

Conclusion: A Call to Reweave the Future of Management 

In a world urgently needing hope, dignity, and connection, rethinking and re-realizing management is not optional—it is essential. 

The examples in our study show that management alternatives are not utopian; they are already alive, albeit fragile, at the margins of mainstream practice. 
To bring these practices to the center, we must move beyond “what” to “how”: beyond abstract ideals to the weaving and continuous reweaving of living fabrics of management. 

The task ahead is not simply to manage more effectively. It is to manage more humanely, weaving organizations that elevate every living being on this planet. Our article also offers important insights for many more management alternatives beyond that of humanistic management, including, but not limited to degrowth, regenerative, decolonial, and circular management alternatives.