{"id":5043,"date":"2024-01-03T09:48:32","date_gmt":"2024-01-03T09:48:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/palmer-consulting.com\/the-three-order-theory-understanding-and-reaffirming-a-french-managerial-model\/"},"modified":"2026-04-16T15:09:43","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T15:09:43","slug":"the-three-order-theory-understanding-and-reaffirming-a-french-managerial-model","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/palmer-consulting.com\/en\/the-three-order-theory-understanding-and-reaffirming-a-french-managerial-model\/","title":{"rendered":"The three-order theory: understanding and reaffirming a French managerial model"},"content":{"rendered":"

How can we reaffirm the French managerial model? France has never been able to conceptualize and clearly assert its managerial model, even though it does exist. The application of Anglo-American management methods is not always adapted to France’s cultural specificities, and can sometimes be more demotivating than anything else. <\/em><\/p>\n

\"La<\/p>\n

The French who ignore themselves<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1991, at the 12th Congress of the French Accounting Association, Jean Pierre Segal asked about resistance to control in France. For him, this simple question raised the deeper problem of the French culture’s attitude to standard management methods. <\/p>\n

The emergence of globalization led to the worldwide dissemination of American management methods, and their identical application by a generation of elites trained in the same mold. However, these methods are clearly generating some friction in certain countries, with noticeable counter-productive impacts. <\/p>\n

This warning is also echoed by Philippe D’Iribarne, who points out that “American management (…) has been codified and is taught in business schools all over the world, enabling non-Americans to appropriate it”, but that these methods “are not so much linked to considerations of efficiency, as to the way in which the relationship between the individual and society is conceived in this country” (2005).<\/p>\n

This question of cultural mechanics – i.e., of a shared cognitive model – as a constraint and basic determinant of management methods, however, has gone unmentioned, and has found only limited interest in the context of international deployments. French organizations have continued to ingest these methods in France, without really questioning their cultural, and therefore customary, compatibility. <\/p>\n

Perhaps it’s logical that 30 years on, some decision-makers are worried that “companies are adopting less and less efficient organizations”, that the French are at the cutting edge, and that the latest management techniques such as agility are struggling to revitalize them.<\/p>\n

While Anglo-Saxon management is based on a methodical objectivity that quantifies and standardizes, French management is mainly based on informal rules of coordination. So much so that “on paper, French management doesn’t exist”, and we’ve never even really understood the point of formalizing it. <\/p>\n

The three-order theory<\/strong><\/p>\n

Every revolution carries with it a conservative inspiration. The question of the common good is as central to Robespierre as it was to Saint Thomas Aquinas. In fact, the abolition of the ancien r\u00e9gime and its orders may in no way have overturned the deep-rooted moral codes of French society, as each individual has simply gained through freedom the right to take advantage of the values of all the orders at once, as if the citizen object had absorbed them all. D’Iribarne’s (1989) observations on the way French workers coordinate themselves lead him to put into perspective what Montesquieu described in “L’esprit des lois” (1748). A culture centered around a “logic of honor”, and said to be made up of three substrates (d’Iribarne, 2006): <\/p>\n