Mathilde Abel^[1] and Patrick Dieuaide^[2]

The writing of an afterword to a volume devoted to gray zones might seem a paradoxical endeavour. An afterword comes after the fact: it brings the book to a conclusion, summarizing its main themes and sometimes seeking to impose some settled meaning on what has just been read. Yet gray zones seem to resist precisely that act of closure. They designate changing situations, uncertain boundaries, norms in the process of disintegration or reconfiguration, and power relations whose outcome is never entirely predetermined. Coming to a conclusion here, then, cannot mean completely dispelling doubt, restoring clear-cut oppositions, or definitively defining the concept itself. The task for us, rather is to look back at the successive shifts of meaning the book documents, the social mechanisms it makes visible, and the questions it necessarily leaves open.

1. A Space of Reconfiguration of Power

The idea of the gray zone is today used to designate a wide variety of situations, threatening sometimes to become a general term applied to anything that appears unstable, ambiguous, or insufficiently institutionalized. Yet its value would seem to lie less in its ability to act as a catch-all label for every kind of uncertainty than in its capacity to bring to light the processes by which categories become blurred, responsibilities are shifted, and power relationships are reconfigured. In this regard, the first conclusion one can draw from the book, no doubt, is that the gray zone cannot and should not be reduced to a mere intermediate space between waged employment and self-employment. This earliest meaning remains essential. The weakening of the relationship of subordination, the rise of the bogus self-employed and the instability of legal classifications do, together, represent one of the starting points of the discussion. But the contributions gathered here are all invitations to broaden our perspective. The gray of ambiguity also haunts modes of remuneration, the distribution of risks, the time and place of work, methods of control, spaces of regulation, the conditions of collective representation, and the categories by which workers define themselves. In other words, it isn’t only employment status that is becoming uncertain: the very bases upon which work can be classified, evaluated, remunerated, and socially protected are undergoing transformation.

The book thus shows us that the gray zone is not just the gray area between two pre-established and determinate employment statuses. It appears, and intensifies, when the legal boundaries of the firm no longer coincide with the actual spaces of the exercise of economic power; when the legally designated employer is no longer the sole actor in a position to determine the organization of work; when rules governing a product, a service, an algorithm, or a territory determine the conditions of work to a greater extent than do the standards specifically applicable to employment. The gray zone is not necessarily, then, a space without rules. On the contrary, it may be the result of normative saturation: public and private rules—written and unwritten, local, national, and supranational—can all overlap without their purposes, scopes of application, and resulting responsibilities being perfectly aligned. This fact obliges us to change the question. It is no longer enough to ask whether a worker is an employee or self-employed. We also have to look at who or what in fact determines the organization of their work, defines its categories, allocates risks, determines how and how much they will be paid, who determines their access to the market, controls their work schedules, can sanction their conduct. These various functions may be distributed among several actors: the legal employer, the platform, the client, the government, local authorities, customers, evaluation mechanisms, or the bodies that define product and service standards.

The gray zone thus requires us to move beyond mere formal classifications and instead trace the chains of power that go to the shaping of the real conditions of work. In this regard, the shift from subordination to control, from the firm to the productive configuration, and from the employment relationship to the social labor relation is one of the volume’s major theoretical contributions. That shift does not imply that legal subordination has lost all relevance. Rather, it allows us to understand how it becomes irrelevant when power is distributed among multiple organizations, is embodied in commercial contracts or embedded in digital infrastructures, and operates at different levels. Broadly speaking, we may say that the contributions gathered together here reveal a transformation in the means of domination. That domination does not vanish with the fading of the traditional figure of the boss or with the apparent relaxation of work discipline, but rather changes form in finding other avenues. It can be exercised through variable remuneration, the algorithmic organization of tasks, control over information, the legal classification of work, or the appropriation of public space as an element of the value chain. The gray zone thus emerges as a space in which power becomes more difficult to locate even as its effects on working conditions remain tangible.

2. A Space of Initiative Pervaded by Tensions

But the gray zone does not merely designate a new topography of domination. Several chapters show that it can also host practices of appropriation, aspirations to autonomy, attempts to do things differently. While self-employment may mask profound economic dependence, employment, for its part, can provide indispensable protections while maintaining forms of subordination that limit initiative and the ability to determine the meaning and organization of one’s work. These two observations do not cancel each other out; they must be considered together. Between employment and self-employment one thus finds such practices as multiple jobholding, collaborations of various kinds, different forms of intermittent work and reconfigurations of the time and place of work, by which workers seek to regain control. This recovery of control does not mean that they can shape their conditions of work as they wish. It may apply only to certain aspects of their work, while key dimensions of its valorization, such as the level of remuneration, remain beyond their control. Autonomy is thus constructed within a space already organized by others, in accordance with rules that individuals can sometimes adapt but are not necessarily able to redefine.

This tension between autonomy and constraint lies at the heart of the book. The innovations or improvisations it tells of, then, should be neither idealized as emancipatory without qualification nor dismissed out of hand for not meeting the standards of employment. They very much have to be understood in relation to the material conditions, the asymmetrical relationships they respond to, and the way in which those involved describe them themselves. This shift in perspective is essential: it prevents the analytical framework from supplanting workers’ own experience, without, however, treating their perceptions as independent of the systems and conventions that organize their work. This focus on experience is all the more important given that the book refuses to consider the changes in course only from the point of view of the Global North. Comparison between France, Canada, the United States, and Brazil shows that what is described as a new phenomenon in societies where employment has long been the dominant form of social integration may elsewhere be part of a long history of informality, of the entanglement of work and life, and of the weak institutionalization of employment. This shift in perspective also invites us to question the categories through which this “novelty” is articulated. Women’s work, characteristically situated at the interface of public and private spheres, reminds us that the ambiguities now associated with platforms have long shaped work that is largely invisible, poorly paid, and lacking in social protection. The boundaries between productive and reproductive labor, between affective engagement and commercial service, and between work, solidarity and citizenship, have always been more porous than the categories elaborated on the basis of male industrial employment would suggest. In other words, gray zones have their own histories, but in the context of the platformization of entire sectors of the economy they take on a new and distinctive aspect with system-wide effects and implications.

3. Toward a Formalization of Informality?

Now part of everyday language, the term “uberization” is an apt portmanteau term for a set of practices intended to circumvent the established regulation of the labor market and the rules governing competition, taxation, and social life more generally. As a provider of precarious, low-wage jobs, often criticized for its enabling undeclared work, the platform economy smacks strongly of the informal. In this respect, the rise of the platforms has contributed to the spread of forms of work once considered marginal that are now becoming commonplace as ways of organising production. Their proliferation extends, reconfigures, and sometimes makes more visible power relations that predate them. It is also contributing to the marked generalization of means to the individualization of conditions and remuneration, transfer of risk and the management of worker availability that had already characterized certain kinds of work outside the bounds of formal employment.

But the usefulness of this notion of the gray zone is not limited to the identification of novel work situations. It also serves to reveal a broader transformation of the operational frameworks of capitalist market economies. Whether we’re talking about work platforms, social networks, marketplaces, or corporate platforms, to name only a few examples, the application of digital technology to mediation is revolutionizing, in more ways than one, the way in which economic and social relations are produced, organized, and managed.

On the one hand, Uber, Deliveroo, Airbnb and the like are more than the creatures of opportunistic boards of directors abusing the exorbitant power granted them by digital technologies. These platforms are also the technological building blocks of a worldwide network infrastructure, integral to local and national life, whose adoption and use by workers and consumers pose a critical threat to established structures of production and commerce. As digital intermediaries, the platforms are pervasive. Using the proven techniques that underpin the attention economy, they impose a distinctive form of control on human subjectivity and cognitive capacities by targeting and formalizing a specific mode of engagement based on users’ sociability (i.e., their ability to connect). In other words, platforms make use, most often for commercial purposes, of people’s qualities, experiences, and shared resources, the things that form the basis of community life, exploiting them to generate relationships and to promote transactions. Given this, the gray zone extends to the inescapable aspect of their operation that is the cognitive and semantic gap between virtual space—with its digitized practices and representations—and the real, material conditions of their realisation in lived space (public, private, social, domestic, familial, etc.). This gap is the product of a data economy and an algorithmic governance that tend to produce and reproduce social norms (tastes, behaviors, values, etc.) on the basis of information collected by the system—norms that are immanent to it, being generated through feedback loops. In other words, user choices and behaviors are suggested (or remote-controlled) via “profiles”, notifications, and/or recommendations based on statistical (probabilistic) models and correlation matrices. In this “computation society,” in which digital labor plays a central role, gray areas are ever-present yet latent. They are individually and collectively embodied in and sustained by the multiple effects of polarization and socio-spatial fragmentation induced by this distinctive form of social (re)mediation. Like informal relations, they can serve as a safety valve to mitigate or protect oneself against the many negative externalities generated by this dynamic. But they can also, once a certain threshold of tolerance is crossed, degenerate into open conflict or even undergo bifurcation, triggering compromise and regulation.

On the other hand, gray zones have become key sites for today’s reshaping of the norms of work. It is within them that relations between autonomy and domination, protection and responsibility, work and employment status, private and public, and economic innovation and political regulation, are redefined. In that respect, they are both a symptom of deinstitutionalization and proving ground for institutions still taking shape. This dual characterization must be respected in its tension. Deinstitutionalization doesn’t necessarily mean the disappearance of all institutions: it can designate the growing disconnect between established frameworks and the practices they are supposed to regulate. Similarly, the instituent processes that emerge in such spaces do not necessarily lead to better social protection. They may lead to new rights, but they may also entrench categories less protective or distribute responsibilities in such a way that no single actor can be clearly held accountable for conditions of work.

To conclude: the central question running through the book is not, perhaps, how gray zones are to be eliminated. Such an ambition would assume that it is always possible, and desirable, to return to perfectly stable boundaries. Rather, the question is to determine which forms of “grayness” must be fought against—because, in formalizing the informal, the gray zones of the digital age promote the invisibility of work, the transfer of risk, and lack of platform accountability—and those which, on the contrary, may foster processes of empowerment, cooperation, and the creation of new rights. The distinction, however, cannot be drawn in the abstract. It requires identifying, in each specific context, the resources available to the actors, the rules they can negotiate, the risks they bear, and the real possibilities they have to transform their conditions of work. Only then will the gray zone cease to be a category denoting mere indeterminacy to become an instrument of critique: not just a way of noting that boundaries are becoming blurred, but a way of analyzing how they have changed, changed by whom, for whose benefit, and with what consequences for work, employment, and workers’ capacity to act.

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