Year: 2021
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Lean development in France reflects in many ways the spread of lean all over the world, with some local specificities. France’s enduring national automotive industry had led very early pioneers to discover Toyota’s uniqueness and appreciate the transformative potential of the Toyota Production System (TPS) well before the term “lean” was coined. French companies then pursued the usual forms of lean, from “automotive” lean, to traditional consulting cost-saving programs disguised as lean, to genuine transformational efforts to understand and adapt the TPS in local conditions. Lean in France has also had some specific French offshoots, such as an obsession with “autonomous teams” and “liberated company” (Getz and Carney 2016), that can be traced to the socio-technical system approach of the Tavistock Institute. More recently, France stands out as the home of several CEOs that have adopted lean as their main business strategy, with very visible results in difficult market conditions and a high labor cost context. Lean and its application in French companies then seems to have become multifaceted, based on continuous and structured learning (Ballé et al. 2006), but also apprehended according to several theoretical frameworks to gradually lead to a richer understanding for researchers (Ballé et al. 2017). This chapter introduces the historical development of lean in France and, through an analysis of lean’s adoption, the three main “lean” perspectives of French companies.
Language: French
Subfield: Management Information Systems
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4211247876