The United KingdomvsFrance
イギリスとフランスUKFR
Seen from the United Kingdom: each line below describes France relative to the United Kingdom.
Culture Map: eight scales
Erin Meyer's eight scales, sorted by how far apart the United Kingdom and France sit, largest gap first.
Filled dot: the United Kingdom, where you are looking fromHollow ring: France
Where you will notice the difference8 scales
Persuading
France wants the theory before the conclusion more than the United Kingdom (5 steps)
The United Kingdom +2, France −3, on a line from −3 (Principles-first) to +3 (Applications-first).
Communicating
France leaves more to be read between the lines than the United Kingdom (2 steps)
The United Kingdom −1, France +1, on a line from −3 (Low-context) to +3 (High-context).
Leading
France keeps more distance between boss and team than the United Kingdom (2 steps)
The United Kingdom −1, France +1, on a line from −3 (Egalitarian) to +3 (Hierarchical).
Trusting
France builds trust through personal relationships more than the United Kingdom (2 steps)
The United Kingdom −2, France 0, on a line from −3 (Task-based) to +3 (Relationship-based).
Disagreeing
France is more willing to disagree openly than the United Kingdom (2 steps)
The United Kingdom 0, France −2, on a line from −3 (Confrontational) to +3 (Avoids confrontation).
Evaluating
France gives negative feedback more directly than the United Kingdom (1 step)
The United Kingdom 0, France −1, on a line from −3 (Direct negative feedback) to +3 (Indirect negative feedback).
Deciding
France leaves decisions to the person in charge more than the United Kingdom (1 step)
The United Kingdom 0, France +1, on a line from −3 (Consensual) to +3 (Top-down).
Scheduling
France treats plans as more flexible than the United Kingdom (1 step)
The United Kingdom −1, France 0, on a line from −3 (Linear time) to +3 (Flexible time).
Hofstede: six dimensions
Scores from 0 to 100, sorted by the gap between the United Kingdom and France. They describe national averages, not either country's character.
Uncertainty avoidance
France scores 51 points higher than the United Kingdom (86 against 35)
The United Kingdom 35, France 86, on a line from 0 (Tolerant of ambiguity) to 100 (Avoids ambiguity).
Power distance
France scores 33 points higher than the United Kingdom (68 against 35)
The United Kingdom 35, France 68, on a line from 0 (Low power distance) to 100 (High power distance).
Motivation towards achievement and success
France scores 23 points lower than the United Kingdom (43 against 66)
The United Kingdom 66, France 43, on a line from 0 (Consensus-oriented) to 100 (Decisive).
Indulgence
France scores 21 points lower than the United Kingdom (48 against 69)
The United Kingdom 69, France 48, on a line from 0 (Restrained) to 100 (Indulgent).
Individualism
France scores 2 points lower than the United Kingdom (74 against 76)
The United Kingdom 76, France 74, on a line from 0 (Collectivist) to 100 (Individualist).
Long-term orientation
France and the United Kingdom both score 60
The United Kingdom 60, France 60, on a line from 0 (Short-term) to 100 (Long-term).
What the sources say, theme by theme
Entries for the United Kingdom and France, side by side on wide screens. Each keeps its own confidence label and citations.
Design & quality
United Kingdom3 claims
The GDS Government Design Principles (published 2012, updated 2025) include "Start with user needs," "Do less," and "Iterate. Then iterate again." Iterative development is an official principle of the public sector.
Well attested1 source2025gb-design-1
Point 8 of the GOV.UK Service Standard is "Iterate and improve frequently." It states that a service is never finished and that maintenance such as bug fixes is not enough.
Well attested1 sourcegb-design-2
According to a 2023 NAO report, there have been 11 cross-government digital strategies in the past 25 years. The Police National Computer, introduced in 1974, is still in use.
Well attested1 source2023gb-design-3
France3 claims
The Culture Map (2014) places France on the principles-first side of Persuading. Meyer says that Latin European and Germanic cultures prefer deductive arguments that move from principles to conclusions.
Attested1 source2014Datedfr-design-1
French engineers are trained mainly through the diplôme d'ingénieur accredited by the CTI. According to the CDEFI Panorama, more than 200 accredited schools award 44,000 to 49,000 engineering degrees a year.
Well attested2 sources2023fr-design-2
According to Numeum, IT services firms (ESN) accounted for 50% (€34.5 billion) of the €69.4 billion digital market in 2024. Many developers work on client sites under the régie model, in which the ESN is accountable for effort rather than deliverables.
Attested2 sources2024fr-design-3
Failure & risk
United Kingdom4 claims
The GDS Way incident management standard requires incident reviews to follow a blameless post mortem culture.
Well attested1 sourcegb-failure-1
GOV.UK publishes incident reports, such as one on increased error rates on 5 January 2022. A former GDS staff member wrote in 2018 that publishing them builds trust and an atmosphere where people can learn safely.
Well attested2 sources2022gb-failure-2
In a 2019 blog post, the London fintech Monzo explained that it runs on-call with two people and records every incident. The Pragmatic Engineer warns against "blameless buck-passing," where blame is shifted while claiming to be blameless.
Well attested2 sources2019gb-failure-3
In the Post Office Horizon scandal, testimony that Horizon was "robust" was used despite bugs in the Fujitsu system, and more than 900 people were wrongly convicted. The Court of Appeal found that the Post Office had in effect reversed the burden of proof.
Attested2 sourcesgb-failure-4
France3 claims
France scores 86 on Hofstede's uncertainty avoidance (UAI), higher than Germany's 65. The Culture Factor explains a high score as a tendency to reduce ambiguity through rules and procedures.
Attested1 source2026fr-failure-1
In GEM 2024, 42.7% of French adults who see business opportunities cited fear of failure as a barrier to starting a business. GEM puts the German figure at about two in five for 2025, so the gap is small.
Well attested2 sources2025fr-failure-2
The CNIL imposed 87 sanctions in 2024, with fines totaling about €55.21 million, up from 21 sanctions in 2022 and 42 in 2023. Of the 69 sanctions under the simplified procedure, 11 were for breaches of data security obligations.
Well attested1 source2025fr-failure-3
Feedback & code review
United Kingdom3 claims
Meyer writes that the British deliver negative feedback less directly than Americans and far less directly than the Dutch. She describes frequent understatement using downgraders such as "a bit" and "slightly."
Attested1 source2014Datedgb-feedback-1
The Anglo-Dutch translation guide that Meyer cites reads "With all due respect" as "I think you are wrong" and "Very interesting" as "I don't like it." The guide is half a joke, and its authorship is disputed.
Attested2 sources2014Datedgb-feedback-2
A study of 44,000 pull requests across 20 projects that compared acceptance rates with the developer's country HDI (Furtado et al., 2020) placed UK developers in the group with the highest acceptance rates.
Attested1 source2020gb-feedback-3
France3 claims
Meyer writes that the French communicate in a more high-context, implicit way than Americans yet deliver criticism more directly. She treats reliance on context and directness of criticism as separate scales.
Attested1 source2014Datedfr-feedback-1
Meyer's website says that people from the United States, France, and the Netherlands are relatively used to heated, confrontational meetings.
Attested1 sourcefr-feedback-2
One book review explains that French disagreement is emotionally expressive, unlike the restrained style of German disagreement.
Thin1 sourcefr-feedback-3
Hierarchy & decisions
United Kingdom3 claims
In Meyer's 2017 HBR chart, the United Kingdom sits in the same egalitarian and top-down quadrant as the United States, Canada, and Australia.
Attested1 source2017gb-hierarchy-1
In the public sector, the service assessment against the Service Standard acts as a de facto gate. According to DfE guidance, a service can fail its assessment if it does not publish new source code without a good reason.
Well attested1 sourcegb-hierarchy-2
The NAO (2023) identifies as a problem that many digital decisions in government are made by generalist leaders without technical expertise.
Well attested1 source2023gb-hierarchy-3
France2 claims
The Culture Map places France toward the hierarchical end of Leading and the top-down end of Deciding, yet on the confrontational side of Disagreeing. Read together, the scales suggest that the boss decides, but only after vigorous debate.
Attested1 source2014Datedfr-hierarchy-1
How the right to disconnect (Labor Code L2242-17, in force since 2017) is applied is a matter for collective bargaining within each company. If no agreement is reached, the employer drafts a charter after consulting the CSE, the staff representative body.
Attested1 source2026fr-hierarchy-2
Communication & docs
United Kingdom3 claims
According to a book summary, the United Kingdom is on the low-context side of Meyer's Communicating scale but relies on context more than the United States, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and Germany.
Thin1 sourcegb-communication-1
"Make things open: it makes things better" is one of the government design principles, and publishing new source code is point 12 of the Service Standard. GDS explained the benefits of coding in the open in a 2017 blog post.
Well attested2 sources2017gb-communication-2
In 2015, Inside GOV.UK published a blog post describing what happens when something goes wrong on GOV.UK.
Well attested1 source2015Datedgb-communication-3
France1 claim
The Culture Map places France as more high-context than Germany (though less than China) on Communicating and more relationship-based than Germany on Trusting. In Meyer's framework, this means relying on shared context and building trust through relationships as well as work.
Attested1 source2014Datedfr-communication-1
Work & careers
United Kingdom4 claims
According to the ONS, full-time workers averaged 36.6 actual hours per week in 2024. The figure covers all occupations, not only engineers.
Well attested1 source2026gb-work-1
In the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025, 31.9% of UK respondents work fully remote and 25.8% work hybrid leaning flexible. Median salaries were $136,141 for engineering managers and $108,913 for back-end developers, about 60 to 70% of US levels.
Well attested1 source2025gb-work-2
Making 20 or more people redundant requires collective consultation. Consultation must start at least 30 days before the first dismissal for 20 to 99 redundancies, and at least 45 days before for 100 or more.
Well attested1 sourcegb-work-3
In a 2022 four-day week pilot (61 companies, about 2,900 employees), 56 companies continued afterward and 71% of employees reported less burnout. Most participants were small companies, and the pilot was not limited to tech.
Attested1 source2023gb-work-4
France5 claims
The statutory working week is 35 hours. The Syntec collective agreement for the IT sector provides a 35-hour arrangement (modalité 1), a 38.5-hour flat arrangement capped at 219 days a year (modalité 2), and forfait jours, a 218-day annual arrangement generally without overtime pay (modalité 3).
Attested2 sources2026fr-work-1
Eurostat data cited by Euronews and Fortune put average actual weekly hours in France at about 36, in line with the EU average and nearly flat from 2014 to 2024.
Attested2 sources2025fr-work-2
According to Numeum, the digital sector employs about 666,000 people. Hiring fell from 83,800 in 2023 to 51,800 in 2024, and turnover dropped from 22% to 16%. The decline was sharpest at large ESNs, while software publishers held up better.
Attested2 sources2025fr-work-3
According to industry blogs and a lawyer's article, ESNs structurally generate idle periods between assignments (intercontrat). Isolation and loss of motivation among consultants waiting for an assignment are cited as problems.
Thin2 sources2022fr-work-4
According to a site compiling Eurostat data, about 11.3% of employed people in France usually worked from home in 2025.
Attested1 source2026fr-work-5
Open source & community
United Kingdom3 claims
According to Octoverse 2024, the UK has more than 4 million developers on GitHub, up 19% year over year. Octoverse 2025 projects about 11 million by 2030.
Well attested2 sources2025gb-oss-1
- GitHub Octoverse 2024 (2024)
- GitHub Octoverse 2025 (2025)
An estimate by the industry body OpenUK (2023) attributes 27% of the UK tech sector's gross value added in 2022 to open source.
Attested1 source2023gb-oss-2
The public sector has made publishing code the default. The Skills Funding Agency reused GOV.UK's Smart Answers code and finished in under a week work that would otherwise have taken at least two months.
Well attested1 source2017gb-oss-3
France5 claims
Under the Digital Republic Act (2016), government source code became an administrative document subject to access requests. Bodies with 50 or more staff must publish it, and Article 16 encourages the use of free software and open formats.
Attested2 sources2017fr-oss-1
The SILL, the interministerial catalog of recommended free software run by DINUM, began in 2012 and reached 500 entries in November 2024. A 2026 announcement says more than 600 tools have been listed over its history.
Well attested2 sources2026fr-oss-2
DINUM's La Suite numérique and Germany's openDesk from ZenDiS have collaborated since 2024. The collaborative editor Docs is a joint Franco-German initiative that the Netherlands is also joining.
Well attested2 sources2026fr-oss-3
VLC began in 1996 as a student project at École Centrale Paris, was released under the GPL in 2001, and has been run by an independent nonprofit since 2009. scikit-learn was supported by Inria from 2010 and moved to the spin-off company Probabl in 2023.
Well attested3 sourcesfr-oss-4
According to Octoverse 2024, France has more than 2.8 million developers on GitHub, up 20% year over year. France ranked fifth by respondents in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025 (1,408, or 4%).
Well attested2 sources2025fr-oss-5