A natural generalization of Balanced Tableaux

We introduce the notion of "type" of a tableau, that allows us to define new families of tableaux including both balanced and standard Young tableaux. We use these new objects to describe the set of reduced decompositions of any permutation. We then generalize the work of Fomin \emph{et al.} by giving, among other things, a new proof of the fact that balanced and standard tableaux are equinumerous, and by exhibiting many new families of tableaux having similar combinatorial properties to those of balanced tableaux.