Radical Human-Centricity: Betting on the Power of Diversity as a Source of Organizational Transformations

Abstract

This paper presents the core tenets of the radical human-centricity concept, posited as a response to the systemic crisis of modern organizational management, where proclaimed human-centricity often results in the instrumentalization of the individual. Drawing on the traditions of cultural activity psychology, dialogical philosophy, existentialism, and post-structuralism, it deconstructs the prevailing reductionist models in management theory and practice: the “human-as function” and the “human-as-bundle-of-skills”. In their stead, the work advances an ontology of the unfinished subject, whose being is a continuous process of meaning making and becoming. Consequently, the organization ceases to be an external machine into which the person is inserted as a component; it transforms into a dialogical space, an environment for co-becoming. The paper substantiates the claim that the genuine source of organizational development, preadaptation, and antifragility lies in a methodology of diversity. Here, diversity is understood not merely as cognitive, but as existential-ontological and anthropological – that is, as the polyphony of human lifeworlds, value systems, and modes of being. The practical implementation of this paradigm necessitates a shift from a subject-object to a subject-subject (dialogic) logic of interaction, a transformation of the leader’s role, a transition from hierarchical structures to network heterarchies, and a rethinking of fundamental organizational processes. Radical human-centricity is a strategic imperative for organizational survival in conditions of complexity and uncertainty, precisely because human agency and irreducible diversity serve as the primary engine for innovation and renewal. The paper substantiates the cultural anthropology of organization as an independent paradigm for analyzing and designing organizational development.