How Alternative Management Ideas Are Realized for the Public Good: Performative Fabrics of Humanistic Practices

Repurposing management for the public good involves realizing alternative ideas to serve societal interests. Humanistic management is centred on such ideas as human dignity and well-being. Realization refers to the generation and maintenance of social realities corresponding to these ideas. The conceptual lens of performativity is uniquely suited for studying realization but requires broadening to capture the wider set of practices involved. Accordingly, we explore the wider performative practices that realize humanistic management ideas and how they do so. We studied three cases through a thematic analysis of 165 interviews, secondary sources, and observations. Our framework explains how humanistic management ideas were realized through performative fabrics of practices, interwoven heterogeneous practices that make and keep the embedded humanistic management ideas real. Performing, interweaving, and reweaving dynamics continuously shape these fabrics of interrelated humanizing, seeding, and nurturing practices. The fabrics generated four types of realizations of humanistic management ideas: potentialities, anomalies, normalities, and transferabilities. We prime a change in the conversation from studies of individual performative practices to relational studies of performative fabrics of practices. We also advance the performativity discussion to understand generativity, stabilization, defence, and reformativity. Our framework contributes theoretically and practically to repurposing management for the public good and offers insight into desirable future making.