France in the 1950s: Taylorian modernity brought about by postmodern organizers?

The success of the French Taylorist approach stems from the ability of the first generation of French Taylorist managers to formulate the Taylorist rules in a rhetoric that French workers of the 1950s could agree with. In a way, these Taylorist managers were “storytellers” able to translate their own rhetoric into the French workers’ culture. Thus it is possible to analyze a very “modern” period (i.e. Taylorism in France in the 1950s) with a postmodern methodology and, further, that “modern actors” (the French Taylorist managers) were able to act as postmodern ones. They accepted the possibility of autonomous discourses and stories from some groups within organizations and the necessity of using these discourses as a vehicle for articulating their own methodologies in order to actually manage the production in the workshops.