Emergent Figures in the Gray Zone

Christian Azaïs^[1]

Abstract

This chapter explores the transformation of work through the lens of “emergent figures”—new categories of workers arising from social and technological change, particularly in the context of location-based digital platforms (e.g., iFood, Uber, UberEats, 99) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. These figures challenge traditional binary classifications (e.g., employment/self-employment) and exemplify the “gray zone”, a concept highlighting the blurred boundaries, instability, and indeterminacy of contemporary labor relations.

Emergent figures are here classified as instituent (gaining institutional recognition, e.g., delivery workers after successful strikes like the Breque dos Apps in 2025), intermediate (transitional, e.g., cyclists saving for motorcycles), or declining (losing status and rights, e.g., former employees forced into self-employment). These categories are fluid, reflecting the dynamic nature of labor markets.

The gray zone offers a framework for analyzing work that escapes rigid dualisms (e.g., formal/informal, subordinate/autonomous). It emphasizes institutional instability, discoherence (Bureau and Dieuaide, 2018)—the misalignment between norms and practices—and the political dimensions of labor regulation.

Digital location-based platforms exercise insidious control through algorithms, customer ratings, and real-time geolocation, masking subordination as autonomy. Workers, though formally “independent” (e.g., MEIs or franchisees in Brazil), face precarity, long hours, and minimal social protections.

The chapter argues that emergent figures and the gray zone offer a robust framework for understanding today’s transformations of work, where flexibility coexists with precarity and institutional innovation outpaces regulatory adaptation. By centering workers’ perspectives and the political economy of platforms, this research challenges normative assumptions about employment, advocating for a pluralistic, dynamic analysis of labor in the digital age. 
   
Keywords: Platform work; gray zone; emergent figures; Brazil; iFood; Uber; MEI; franchise models; worker rights.

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Introduction

Central to the argument here is the idea of “emergent figures”, by which are meant new categories of worker thrown up by processes of social and technological change and in some sense typical of the conjuncture in which they emerge. The idea is thus, in a way, inherent to that of the gray zone^[2] as an aspect of a world of work undergoing repeated drastic transformations. The idea of the gray zone, for its part, takes on its full significance when it is understood to extend beyond the sphere of work and employment in the narrow sense to encompass that world’s relationship to the political, in so far as the latter determines the institutional arrangements undergirding the development of “social labor relations” (D’Amours et al. 2022). This chapter takes the case of those who work via location-based digital platforms specializing in food delivery or passenger transport—in Brazil, and more specifically in Rio de Janeiro—to illustrate its broader argument, for it offers important insights into a changing world of work.

Why, though, approach that through the idea of emergent figures? Given the way the Fordist wage relation is being put into question and new forms of the organization of work have made their appearance with the rise of digital platforms, there is a need to develop new categories that go beyond those upon which the sociology of work was founded, notably the three unities, of time, place and action, highlighted by Dubar and Tripier (1998).

The growing irrelevance of binary analytical categories such as the employment/self-employment dyad calls for the development of new conceptual frameworks that can help us actually understand the transformations of work today, all the more when these are the corollary of constantly changing business structures, as is the case with the digital platforms. These last have brought about much-discussed changes in the labor market that require a change in the way we look at things if the emergence of new categories of worker is to be understood. Emergent figures, then, may be classified as instituent, intermediate, or declining,^[3] an analytic that avoids the binary and accords with the idea of the gray zone, which registers the existence of situations where the dividing lines between categories are blurred on account of changes in normative frameworks as new norms uncertainly come into existence and old ones lose their purchase. As manifestations of current practice—of gray zones in the plural—these figures reflect the inherent dynamics of the labor market.

While the boundaries between these three types of figure would have to be fixed in any formal typology—something I do not venture to develop here—figures themselves can of course shift across them, reflecting the fate of emergent occupational categories and the individuals they represent. This may vary both temporally and geographically, with figures becoming firmly institutionalized or eventually disappearing from the labor market.

We first consider the three types of emergent figures in turn, in their relation to the idea of the gray zone. With these considerations in mind, we then go on to look at the relationships to work that digital platforms entail or foster; this in turn requires us to broaden our focus to take in the environment in which the platforms operate, that is, the institutional arrangements they bring about and their relationship to the territory they operate in, more particularly here the location-based platforms. The discussion draws on a series of 43 interviews (Magaldi et al. 2024b) with car, motor-cycle and cycle delivery workers in Rio de Janeiro, supplemented by a few examples from other contexts.

Emergent Figures and the Gray Zone: A Background Sketch

The emergent figures under consideration here are each associated with situations that workers find themselves in in the labor market. They may be instituent, intermediate or declining, as discussed above.^[4] Concretely speaking, instituent emergent figures are associated with the non-linear occupational trajectories of individuals whose means of making a living succeed in winning a recognized place among the ranks of the occupations, validated by such institutions as national statistical authorities, among others.^[5] Such institutional consolidation enables them to counter the instability characteristic of the gray zone, and they accordingly seek to ensure the permanence of the gains they have made, either through struggle or through negotiations conducted by trade unions or other professional organizations—with public authorities, or indeed the representatives of competing occupations, something quite common in France with the rivalry between drivers using digital ride-hailing platforms^[6] and the taxi drivers who now often also use apps to pick up fares.

On a number of occasions since 2020, the year that saw the first notable mobilization of delivery drivers and motoboys (as their motorbike-mounted counterparts are known in Brazil), platform-based delivery workers have stopped work in pursuit of their claims regarding safety, protection in the case of accidents, pay, and recognition by digital platforms.^[7] Until the most recent, on 31 March and 1 April 2025,^[8] these few large-scale mobilizations had not met with success. Known as the Breque dos Apps,^[9] this last strike was however victorious, with iFood, Brazil’s largest take-away delivery platform finding itself obliged to increase pay and to improve conditions of work and social protection. This in itself was a victory, considering the failure of previous struggles. The gains won by the workers in question were accepted as normative by iFood, which committed itself to respecting them, a form of institutionalization and a recognition of the success of the mobilization.

The second category of emergent figure, the “intermediate”, can take a number of forms. It is not a priori destined to perdure—such is the case of interns awaiting formal employment, of workers in training or ride-hail drivers between more formal employments, but also that of all professions and occupations whose exercise departs from the Fordist ideal type and are so marked by indeterminacy (Azaïs 2019a). Should the situation of this figure prove long-lived, it will then merge into the category of the declining figure, by virtue of its precarity. Among delivery workers and ride-hail drivers, one can place in this category the bicycle delivery workers who plan to hire or purchase a motor-cycle in the hope of having more work and hence more pay. A reverse example might be someone like motoboy Nicolas Souza Santos (who features in the video cited in footnote 7) who after an unsuccessful attempt to become a ride-hail driver had to fall back on the motor-cycle, having been unable to cover the expense of the car. Wider economic developments quite independent of any worker’s intention in making such a shift will determine whether they are joining an instituent or a declining category.

Why declining? Because this class of worker is engaged in a struggle to prevent the rights earlier associated with it being eroded or swept away. It is its capacity to recover from such attacks that will determine to what degree security is lost. Into the category of declining figure fall those whose occupations have changed radically or are even in the process of disappearing, bringing with it a loss of status and social benefits. Examples might be secretaries and audio-typists: the former saw the job transformed over a couple of decades (Delahaye and Granier 2011), while the latter, almost all of them women, simply vanished from the world of work, to reappear years later as conference stenographers—a well-regarded and highly paid profession. Other examples might be given, such as the former employees who find their work out-housed and no longer enjoy the protections afforded by employment, either because the business has been franchised out (under legislation to be discussed later) or because they have been required to become formally self-employed. Over-hasty consideration might suggest that, normatively speaking, such workers fall within the category of declining figures. Yet experience shows that what a researcher might take to be a backward step in fact reflects a choice made by the individual, perhaps reluctantly, but one that is nonetheless undeniably a cause of satisfaction. Such was the case, for example of the motor-cycle delivery worker interviewed in Rio who preferred to be self-employed and to work for several clients as compared to his former situation as an employee when his monthly income was less and he had no control over his hours (Magaldi et al. 2024b), and this despite the loss of the social protections afforded by his former status. It is equally undeniable that the businessman who demands that his former employees became one-person businesses or MEIs (Micro-Empresário Individual, meaning individual micro-entrepreneur) also does very well out of the deal, no longer having to pay employer’s contributions or accept constraints on his freedom of action or—in the case of ride-hail drivers or bicycle or motor-cycle delivery workers—the prospect of being taken to court for disguised employment and having his “staff” reclassified as employees. This example clearly shows how situations are not fixed, but there is always danger in over-hasty interpretation informed by the a priori conviction that standard employment represents the best of all possible worlds, ignoring the opinions of those themselves concerned (Magaldi et al. 2024a). To think of ride-hail drivers or food-delivery workers as victims of their situation is to ignore the realities on the ground.

This rapid overview of the three types of emergent figures makes plain their dynamic character, the fact that they are dependent on processes whose course and final results cannot be predicted in advance, and that they consequently offer a window onto the transformations of work. Furthermore, an approach in these terms invites consideration of individual subjectivities, for the same situation can be experienced as a demotion by one and as a promotion by another. This can be seen among undocumented delivery workers, ex-offenders leaving prison—and the unemployed poor more generally, racialized or not—for whom delivery work represents the only possible access to the labor market and to daily pay.

In so far as a gray-zone approach concerns itself with institutions and individual practices, it avoids the pitfalls of an approach in terms of formal norms. The essential characteristics of the gray zone are instability, insecurity and indeterminacy (Azaïs 2019b), to which one might add the discoherence [décohérence] evoked by Bureau and Dieuaide (2018) (on which, see below), which only amplifies the aleatory effect of the processes at work.

Are these, though, new processes? The answer is no. Emergent figures have always existed, throughout history. They are the outcome of tendencies that would eventually result in the institutionalization of practices, or, on the contrary, lead to the gradual disappearance of the figures concerned, or indeed some intermediate situation. They are the fruit of tensions, of frictions between actors within institutions, or the manifestation of forces pressing for the acceptance of the norms and standards that they embody so as to bring about the institutionalization of their practices. Yet such institutionalization is never definitive.

Given this classification of emergent figures, what is their connection with the notion of the gray zone? It is that they express tendencies to evolution, retrogression or stasis that reflect the inherent tensions of the labor market.

It was the legal scholar Alain Supiot (2000) who first evoked, a quarter of a century ago, the existence of a gray zone between employment and self-employment. He was then much exercised by the fact that formal recognition of this intermediate zone as a third realm would require the introduction of appropriate legislation, while this would actually be impossible, because the gray zone was not, in fact, some kind of half-way house between the two established employment statuses: employment and self-employment themselves did not escape it, being also marked by the gray areas, the fuzziness, the uncertainties and the disregard for norms that defined the gray zone itself. Another path was blazed by the Italian researchers and lawmakers who concerned themselves with those they called parasubordinati (Accornero 1998) or economically dependent workers (Antonmattei and Sciberras, 2008). The “parasubordinate” worker is the self-employed worker who is nonetheless economically dependent on one or more clients. Referring to the situation in Italy, Bisignano (2023, 1) writes: “Verging on employment, these work situations raise significant issues for labor-market institutions, in terms of social rights, pay, or the recognition of qualifications. In addition, these issues affect not only the parasubordinate, but also other precarious, marginal groups among the employed (casual or intermittent workers, etc.).” These examples illustrate the blurring of boundaries between protected and unprotected work situations, and the social protection extended to workers in employment stands at the heart of many debates and demands raised by the workers we are concerned with here.

For Supiot (2000), the gray zone was the expression of two phenomena: the emergence of autonomy in subordination in the case of the employee, and of a condition of allegiance in independence in the case of the (self-employed) solo entrepreneur. This opened the way to the recognition of a multitude of overlapping situations. The idea of the gray zone has proved particularly fruitful for the sociology of labor and the study of labor law, as witnessed by a number of recent works (among them Grillo and Soares in their chapter here, Azaïs et al. 2017; Boulin and Kesselman 2018; Bureau et al. 2019, 2024; Bureau and Dieuaide 2018; Carelli et al. 2022; Carleial and Azaïs 2017; Dieuaide 2024a; Kesselman 2022, 2025; Siino and Soussi 2017). One of its advantages is that it highlights the great variety of forms in which labor is set to work in the contemporary world, only too often reduced to such mutually exclusive pairs of categories as employment vs. self-employment, subordination vs. autonomy, formal vs. informal and so on, while reality cannot be reduced to such neat dualisms. Such notions as the blurring (Azaïs 2015), fuzziness or permeability of boundaries are more apt to capture the intrinsic complexities of the world of work and employment. Here I seek to outline the specifics of the gray zone and to demonstrate the utility of the concept in the analysis of relationships of work and employment, in that it does not leave out of consideration the role of institutions and of the organizations that structure them. While emergent figures are indicators of the fluctuations and tentative reconfigurations characteristic of the world of work today, the question of time remains central to the sociological analysis of work. This is itself nothing new, time being the common denominator of every modern form of the organization of work, whether Taylorism, Fordism or Toyotism. Today, the just-in-time workers of digital delivery platforms see their time monitored, measured and controlled, their pay depending on the time spent in or on their vehicles and the distance covered in effecting deliveries (Abílio 2021). Research on ride-hail drivers and bicycle and motor-cycle delivery riders in Rio de Janeiro offers indications of the way in which the fragmentation of working time typical of platform work is experienced and judged by such workers (Magaldi et al. 2024a). Though it often brings very long working hours, flexibility of working time is seen as positive by many, allowing them to fit work around private life. This observation contributes to a better understanding of the temporal dynamics of work in the platform economy, work in which just-in-time labor is demanded by consumers, restaurants and platforms, in which every operation is timed, and, just as on the assembly-line, the degree of initiative that remains to the worker is absolutely minimal. Furthermore, digital platforms have succeeded in off-loading the problem of down-time—a crucial issue for every form of organization of work—onto their workers.

The Exercise of Control Over App-Based Ride-Hail and Food-Delivery Workers: An Emergent Gray Zone

The geolocalized digital platforms responsible for recent transformations in both work and employment oblige researchers to reconsider the analytical categories hitherto applied to work and employment. The mobile app workforce, in the form of ride-hail drivers and delivery riders, made its appearance on the urban scene some ten or so years ago. They represented a tendency that has since spread throughout the world, in Brazil with iFood, 99 and Uber, in France with Uber, most importantly, together with Deliveroo and UberEats, to cite only the most notable of the ride-hail and food delivery platforms. In China, there is the Didi Chuxing platform (ordinarily called Didi) which dominates the local market and has a presence in a number of other countries, where it now controls several transport firms. In January 2018, in fact, Didi, already a minority shareholder in 99, is said to have paid 600 million US dollars for the remainder of the stock, in a deal that would have valued the company at more than a billion dollars, and is now engaged in fierce competition with Uber and iFood. These digital platforms have become powerful multinational corporations whose financial structure (Daugareilh 2021; Sauviat 2019) and mode of operation have no precedent in the business world. The best known, Uber most notably among them, took years to become profitable. Money poured in even though investors had no assurance of any return on their investments, for which they had to wait a long time. These new entities, which one might also reasonably describe as emergent, most having existed for only a decade or so, today control hundreds of thousands of workers and are still growing. Traditional couriers, called office-boys in Brazil, were employees of the business that provided them with the tools of their trade (bike, motorbike, or even a car) and benefitted from the social protection that came with that status. They could not, however, choose which deliveries to undertake and were subordinated to their employers. Today, they are sole traders (US: sole proprietors),^[10] self-employed, franchisees or MEIs, formally subordinate to no-one. Their dependence is masked. Such transformations of status and work situation are commonplace.

The numerous scholarly studies of the informal sector have already done something to go beyond binary approaches, demonstrating that there is no clear line of separation between the formal workers who enjoy the protections associated with employment, on the one hand, and the informal workers, who do not, on the other. Reality is more complex, and it is not uncommon for overlaps to exist, associated with the dynamics of emergent figures and of the gray zone more generally. One sees this in the case of the ride-hail drivers and delivery riders under consideration here. These are individuals who have chosen this type of occupation, some for lack of any better option, having failed to find employment, or any sufficiently well paid. Many of them declare themselves to be free of hierarchical control, being their own boss at work and able to choose their own hours. They “earn their money”, as they say (Bernard 2020; Magaldi 2022), very often at the cost of long and exhausting days of work, but they are glad not to have anyone to shout at them because they arrive late or their work is unsatisfactory. They feel empowered. Yet they are still subject to the ratings awarded by clients and the possibility of account disactivation hangs perpetually over their heads. Their independence, then, is relative, something well understood by the platforms themselves, which take advantage of the existence of the “digital reserve army” in maintaining a certain level of threat that compels drivers and delivery riders to adhere to the standard they must achieve—or believe they must achieve—if they are to continue to receive calls offering work, and, above all, not find themselves blocked on account of a poor client rating impacting their overall score. Three scores are awarded by iFood: 1, 2 and 3. The rider who has a score of 3 is much better off than one who has 1, who gets offered jobs, and more advantageous jobs, much less often. The delivery rider who has reached level 2 will see level 3 as a goal to be attained and consequently seek to meet the platform’s demands. Riders’ strategy, then, is to avoid getting marked down and to accept every job offered. It is, then, their subjectivity, their very selves, that is engaged, in the same way as by “nudges” (Azaïs et al. 2017).

Self-employment in the sense of working for oneself and not for an employer can take a number of legal forms in Brazil, among them registration as an MEI^[11] or franchisee, testimony to the political interest in getting away from the traditional contract of employment represented by the Consolidação das Leis do Trabalho^[12] (Consolidation of Labor Laws) that has governed employment since 1943. Those two statuses in particular are favored by Brazil’s digital platforms, avoiding the possible reclassification as employees of those who work for them. Yet the platforms still exercise an insidious control, inherent in the way that work for them is organized.

So it is, then, as Dieuaide put it, that “The prescription of tasks gives way to the prescription of subjectivity through the introduction of a whole raft of arrangements intended to ensure subjective involvement and maximize the engagement of the worker’s personality in this relationship of mutual communication” (Dieuaide 2024b, 3).^[13]  This situation, typical of platform work, relies on the worker’s personal engagement; this comes on top of what digital platforms have set in place in terms of the intermediation of work (Abel and Dieuaide 2023; Azaïs et al. 2017), obligatory on the ride-hail drivers and delivery workers who make use of them. It is no longer a matter of “straightforward” subordination (Cingolani 2022) but of control of the worker’s own will. This helps muddy the waters, as platforms describe their workers as autonomous, making all decisions for themselves, and workers often see themselves the same way, only adding to the opacity typical of the gray zone. Workers are free to work when they want, and it is they who decide how many hours they will put in, or, more realistically, fix for themselves the amount of money they aim to earn for the day or the week. This is the common habit, whether working as a ride-hail driver, or bicycle or motorcycle delivery rider. So it is they who decide how much they want to earn, setting the target themselves, by the day for the poorest and by the week for the rest. There is no obvious external control and platforms have no role in managing the workforce, an argument made in court against the reclassification of platform workers as employees. Brazil’s iFood, which started as a takeaway delivery platform before diversifying,^[14] has 310,000 bicycle delivery riders on its books, well worthy of description as a “digital reserve army”. In the month of March 2025 alone, iFood received 110 million takeaway delivery orders, an increase of 30% over the year before (76 million deliveries), and worked with 350,000 partner establishments (www.institucional.ifood.com.br, consulted on 2 May 2025). Its growth has been relentless. Furthermore, in order to counter the implantation in Brazil of Chinese platform Meituan,^[15] a competitor of Uber’s on the global market, iFood has recently concluded a partnership agreement with Uber for takeaway delivery. Users of the Uber app will be able to order food to be delivered, while users of the iFood app will be able to have their orders delivered by Uber.^[16]

The Relative Autonomy of Ride-Hail Drivers and Delivery Riders

The autonomy of ride-hail drivers and bicycle and motorcycle delivery riders that is boasted of by the platforms amounts to very little in reality. In fact, neither drivers nor riders set the price of the journey, while the route they take is more or less decided by the algorithm, failure to adhere to its recommendations leading to sanctions by the platform that may go as far as the blocking of the account. What we are talking about is not autonomy, but flexibility. Flexibility in the choice of working hours and days of work, flexibility in the sense of being able to tailor these to the requirements and constraints of family life; these are real possibilities open to platform workers that certainly give them a feeling of control over their daily lives, but in no way a sense of being in business on their own account. The word empreendedor, entrepreneur, was never used in the interviews we undertook, no more than the word empregado for employee. Interviewees were neither one nor the other, but something in-between, thus finding themselves in the heart of the gray zone. The advent of the digital platforms has changed the meaning of being in business, as well as of work, subordination and control. With the platform capitalism described by Cingolani (2021), the nexus has become more complex. Subordination becomes more diffuse, but control is intensified, by virtue of the algorithm that guides and monitors; drivers’ and riders’ dependence on scores awarded by customers; geolocalization in real time; and the internalization of this control by the so-called “independent” workers, discussed above as the control of subjectivity. One result of this is that the analytical categories supposed to give an account of the changes have lost their purchase, necessitating a new framework for understanding the labor market.

The relationship between platform and worker cannot be thought of as simply bilateral, for it is but one aspect of the triangular relationship between service provider, customer and platform in which the asymmetry of information works in favor of the platform as opposed to the other two parties (Abel and Dieuaide 2023; Azaïs and Dieuaide 2020; Azaïs et al. 2017). The platform holds information supplied by the other two actors and is unwilling to share it, even where required by law; the biggest platforms, in fact, wish to “lay down the law”, adopting standards that they then seek to impose on the public authorities.^[17] It is the platform that holds the power of triangulation, as Abel and Dieuaide put it (2023). It is more than a neutral intermediary between the two others, neither of whom knows anything about the other. The mere fact of the platform’s ability to take advantage of driver mobility through surge pricing, indicating that there is a great demand for rides at a certain location and that a higher rate will be payable, says a great deal about who controls the flow of information. It is not unusual, according to a number of drivers, that the incentive has been withdrawn by the time they get there. This, say the most experienced among them, is what differentiates “old-timers” from the “newbies” who do not know the ins-and-out of the business. The former will ignore the incitation, sparing themselves the waste of time and money by remaining where they are and getting allocated a ride or rides that in the end will pay considerably better.

Discoherence: A Theoretical Challenge

The gray zone is where the processes of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization are played out, a theater of what Grillo and Soares aptly dub “institutional instability”, which they explain by showing how “the effects of austerity policy in eroding employment rights came on top of the effects of regulatory reforms introduced at a rapid and at the same time irregular pace, leading to regulatory uncertainty” (see Grillo and Soares in this volume). Once the guarantees associated with the contract of employment have been relaxed or eroded, the way is clear for new standards to become established, often to workers’ detriment, leading to increased uncertainty in the case of dispute with an employer. The two key institutions that are the trades unions and the employment courts have seen a number of significant changes over recent years, further accentuated by the labor market reform of 2017. The unions with the end of the compulsory payment of union dues by all employees, such payment now being entirely voluntary, while the employment courts, for their part, are confronted by the tendency to flexibilization promoted by the recent reforms intended to “modernize” work relations. This has led to an increasing individualization of such relations.

The institutions traditionally responsible for defending workers thus find themselves in difficulties, where they do not face explicit challenge, and the changes evoked above have tended to the augmentation of gray zones and an increase in discoherence. They thus present a theoretical challenge, in that the consequent institutional instability requires researchers to rethink their categories. What questions, in fact, arise? And is legislation an appropriate response? It would seem no, or not entirely, for the assimilation of the new can pose problems for state organs, whose temporalities are not those of social groups. Furthermore, they must have available the intellectual tools to take on board the new and to develop an appropriate norm, while the parties involved must desire it.

Seeking to go beyond the concept of the wage relation inherited from French regulation theory, D’Amours and Pogliaghi (2023) elaborated on the concept of “social labor relations” taken from the regulationist economists Lacroix and Mollard (1995), which proves more fruitful than the other in that it asks what parties are actually involved in matters of work and employment, without limiting itself to employer and employee alone, or only to the legal framework. In fact, as D’Amours and Pogliaghi remind us (2023, 116), “the form of the employment contract tells us nothing about social relations, being no more than a legal codification that presents the image that societies adopt of what these relations ought to be (Supiot 1996, 666)”. The legal categorization is not enough by itself “to identify the parties to the employment relationship and the social relations of power and dependence that tie them together” (D’Amours and Pogliaghi 2023, 117).

Bureau and Dieuaide (2018) use the term décohérence [rendered here as discoherence], to designate the disintegration—the loss of coherence—of certain institutions or norms that are no longer adequate to reality. The discoherence of employment standards reflects both the proliferation of zones of lawlessness and actors’ strategies to circumvent or altogether evade existing legislation. It involves, they say, a double movement: loss of coherence by reason of the proliferation of standards, and the mismatch between categories and practice that leads to the systematic failure of regulation. The notion highlights the unstable, indeterminate and uncertain character of institutions but also the practices of actors. Instability of institutions on account of the overlapping of regional, national and international norms, and also the dynamic character of relations between the actors involved in regulation. According to these two authors, these things lead to demands for new rights and attempts to develop new forms of regulation. What will become of these is uncertain. The uncertainty extends to employment relations, today becoming an almost definitive feature. For this, gray zone theory offers an appropriate analytical framework, as Bureau and Dieuaide (2018, 263) remind us, as they seek to “emphasize the usefulness of the notion of gray zones in understanding the singularity and diversity of the dynamics currently transforming employment norms”. The gray zone proves to be a tool for grasping changes in the employment relationship, itself now marked by discoherence.

This last is not the same as incoherence, glossed by French lexicographers as “absence of consistency, logic or rationale” manifesting as “disconnectedness, contradiction, disorder of thought” and “defect of reasoning, lack of coordination between thought and expression or act”.^[18] Discoherence highlights phenomena that seem to “go without saying” but which do not, or have ceased to, correspond with reality. The field of occupational, employment and work relations is particularly rich in illustrations of such developments.

Methodological Implications

All this raises a number of methodological issues. If the notion of emergent figure is to be of any heuristic value, taken in its three aspects of “instituent”, “intermediate” and “declining”, there arises the question of thresholds: at what point does one say that a figure falls under one of these descriptions? Context alone is not sufficient. The plasticity of the three terms is integral to the understanding of the gray zone that they offer. “The notion of discoherence reflects a dual trend: the loss of coherence through the proliferation of standards and the misalignment between categories and practices, leading to a systematic, repeated and lasting failure of regulation”, say Bureau and Dieuaide (2018, 263). This is an especially valuable notion, adequate to the shifting contexts in which individuals find an occupation and a place in the labor market when not entering an employment relationship. It is more specifically the case for platform workers—self-employed workers, and emergent figures in chronological terms, most having made their appearance on the labor market only very recently, most notably the bicycle delivery riders.

Identifying the presence of emergent figures is only a first step towards understanding what they might represent for labor markets. Their existence once noted, what can one say of their role and in what way are they premonitory signs of developments that might in time become well-established? Mere description is not enough. The methodological challenge lies in the fact that emergent categories of worker are mobile, in that instituent today could well be intermediate tomorrow and declining thereafter. One might be clinging to a status that is in the process of breaking down, while another might be embarking on a process of institutionalization, winning a place among the recognized occupations or occupational groups. At which point it becomes more difficult to dislodge, as various institutions, actors and stakeholders will have contributed to its consolidation. That is when territory and public space come into play, especially when it is a matter of geolocalized platforms. Figures so instituted may be followed by other figures that did not exist yesterday and whose fate is not sealed in advance, given that they have just made their appearance and that they may indeed be on the way to institutionalization. Similarly, an emergent figure that enjoyed a certain prestige on its first appearance—I’m thinking here of bicycle delivery riders, of the cycle couriers of yesteryear, and the associated ethos of athleticism, masculinity, environmentalism and so on—can lose its aura with time and fall into the category of declining figures, in their case on account of the decline in pay, indeed, but also a tarnishing of the image, for the rider population has changed, in both France and in Brazil. In France, they are undocumented young migrants, often subject to inhumane and degrading conditions; in Brazil, the youth of the poor suburbs who have no access to more rewarding work. Relying on numbers and reluctant to have riders or drivers use only one app, which might be interpreted by judges as evidencing disguised employment, platforms make no effort to acquire a loyal cadre of workers and are happy for those who work for them to work for other platforms as well. The usual understanding, and the position of the platforms too, is that work as a delivery rider or ride-hail driver is merely a source of supplementary income. However, both the statistical data and field surveys in such countries as Brazil show exactly the opposite. While it may indeed be a source of supplementary income for some, given the number of hours actually worked it is generally not possible for riders or drivers to combine this work with another occupation (Magaldi 2024b).

There is a key idea that helps us move on from a mere phenomenology of the emergent figure to endow it with more theoretical substance. Defined as the nexus of relations between workers and those entities liable to influence—that is, to control to some extent—their conditions of work and employment, the concept of “social labor relations” can be applied to the study of employment relations of any type and equally to the analysis of every kind of paid work—employment or self-employment, formal or informal—without remaining trapped by predefined categories imposed on processes from outside (D’Amours et al. 2022, 6).

Though presented and indeed self-presenting as “independent”, “autonomous”, as “sole trader” or, more rarely, as self-employed (employeur de soi-même) when working for a digital platform, workers are in fact subject to insidious forms of control that claim to have nothing to do with the old subordination, a chiefly disciplinary, hierarchical form of direct control. This masking of subordination allows digital platforms to oppose any demand for reclassification. They, then, will talk about satisfying workers’ desire for independence, of giving them a chance of earning a living, even if only a very frugal one despite the long hours worked, or of topping up an income earned elsewhere, while both platform and worker deny the existence of an employment relationship. In this fashion, workers gain access to work without gaining the benefits of an employment relationship: a wage in consideration of subordination, a status, and with it employment rights and social protection (Bentein and Guerrero, 2008).

Consequently, “the replacement of the idea of the wage relation with that of social labor relations has as its corollary a shift from the idea of subordination to that of control, which allows recognition of the fact that workers are not under the control of their employers only” (D’Amours, Briand et al. 2023, 297). This idea of control makes possible a more adequate analysis of relations of work and employment as it recognizes the multiple sources of the power that was previously attributed to the employer alone. Once there is no official employer, it is workers’ consent to the terms offered by the platforms that comes into play, engaging their subjectivity. They must deal alone with the difficulties they face, being unable to hold anyone else responsible. In accordance with the functional logic of the platforms, which do not employ the workers they control, there is very often no-one against whom to have recourse when they suffer loss or damage.

Digital Platforms as Promoters of Institutional Innovation

In their efforts to take advantage of legislation, or circumvent it, or even to become rule-makers themselves, digital platforms have acted as institutional innovators. Since the 1990s and the implementation of neoliberal policies in Brazil, both social actors and the state have promoted models of independent work, culminating in the labor market reform of 2017 (Cardoso and Azaïs 2019). In December 2024, for example, the Brazilian Supreme Court ratified the constitutionality of contracts of intermittent employment, officially permitted under the CLT since the 2017 reform. This Brazilian version of the zero-hours contract, as Forte describes it (2024), was introduced as a means of making work more flexible through the legalization of employment practices that were previously illegal. Such measures allow digital platforms to circumvent hitherto existing legislation while reinforcing the idea that employment contracts should be concluded on the basis of individual consent alone.

With the rise of the platforms, we are seeing a shift in the way that the relationship to work and the institutional treatment of workers on the labor market are conceived. In insisting on the fact that workers are free to choose their working hours and that platforms therefore exercise no direct control over their workers, it is in fact the latter’s subjectivity that is being engaged. In this, the distinctions between autonomy and dependence or between autonomy and subordination are blurred and platforms can consequently not be accused of unlawful employment practices because no contract of employment has been concluded. Thus freed of any responsibilities toward the workers who have chosen to work for them, they institute more insidious forms of control (Abílio 2021). Yet one cannot ignore the opinions of the many platform workers, be they ride-hail drivers or bicycle or motorcycle delivery riders, who declare themselves satisfied with their conditions of work because they are not dependent on some boss. Furthermore, for the least skilled among them, these occupations allow them earn better pay than if they were working for an employer (Magaldi et al. 2024a).

To the outsourcing to logistics operators—companies specialized in logistics management—of certain aspects of the management of the labor-force, such as the logging of working hours, payment for journeys, the planning of itineraries and other functions, such as practiced by the iFood platform, have now been added two new models of work organization, the franchise and mini-franchise, to be discussed below. Before that, however, it is necessary to say a few words about the two categories of workers who make use of the iFood platform. On the one hand, logistics operators manage delivery riders from a pouso—a gathering place in the city where they wait for a job, the location changing with demand, forcing riders to be flexible in this respect. Subjected to certain rules, they must reserve on the platform the time slots they want to work, and they are penalized if they are then unavailable. Delivery drivers registered with a logistics operator will move round the city to make deliveries within reasonable distances (given the steep slopes of the São Paulo metropolitan area). For 7 per cent commission, they can receive their pay on a daily basis, important for those on a very tight budget. On the other hand, the nuvens (literally “clouds”) who serve as an adjustment variable, as it were, that the platform mobilizes when required, are freer to move around than riders registered with a logistics operator. They are paid on Wednesday and will not be paid before then.

In 2022, iFood established EntreGô,^[19] a business whose stated objective is to “improve logistics management and standardize best practices with LOs, with a view to increasing the efficiency and scalability potential of these companies”.^[20] These last operate under franchise agreements, which helps the platform to definitively absolve itself of any responsibility for worker protection, moving yet further away from the model of subordination provided for by the CLT.

Furthermore, while the three categories of emergent figures cover a wide range of situations, from their institutionalization to an uncertain future or more or less imminent disappearance, none of this says anything about the quality of the jobs associated with them.

Conclusion

The decision to organize the argument around emergent figures rests on two grounds. As “figures”, they are reflections of a process, while “emergent” denotes their novelty, yet a novelty that has no fixity. In this, emergent figures in their diversity offer keys to the understanding of what gray zones are, the second main concern of this article. Like them, they are dynamic and mobile, never given once and for all. They are of interest in offering an understanding of developments and retrogressions in the world of work. The idea of gray zones makes it possible to move beyond the normative framework of Fordist waged employment. Representing only a tiny span of time in the history of work, this took surest root in the countries of the Global North, and while the promise of the extension of wage-earning society to the people of the South has been evoked in a number of countries it has failed to come to pass in many. The notion of the emergent figure is, however, no panacea, for it can become difficult, at times, in certain contexts, to determine what is instituent, intermediate or declining. To what concrete features should the descriptors be tied? Each has to be defined by reference to a certain stability, an ideal type that often has little direct connection to reality, for situations are neither stable nor definitive. A shift from one to another is not easy to spot, a fact itself unproblematic and consonant with the insight they offer into the gray zone and the blurring of boundaries between different situations in both work and employment.

The idea of the gray zone helps objectivate the processes at work, and with that, the transformations of work, transformations themselves instanced by the emergent figures that embody the dynamics at play, giving substance to the gray zone. The two processes are closely linked. Recent research on these occupations in Rio de Janeiro has shown that their situations were not, in fact, as precarious as all that, that in terms of income they were better off than informal workers, even if indeed worse off than the employed workers who worked fewer hours than they. While employees cannot increase their incomes, fixed by contract, these others can do so by increasing the number of hours a day they work, though often at the cost of their health. Yet their view of their own condition is less negative than many studies have suggested. They declare themselves to be “autonomous”, “free”, “in control of their schedules”, though few would consider themselves to be “entrepreneurs of themselves”, as Foucault (2004) put it. To speak of alienation here is no more than a value judgment. To stay as close as possible to what individuals themselves say about how they see things, as taught by the sociology of labor, and setting aside any ideological a priori, is essential to understanding the development of the social relations of work. This is made possible by the emergent-figures approach proposed here, which avoids all linearity of analysis and takes account of “asymmetries” (Cingolani 2021), both means of escaping the binary.

Interest in the work of occupations—ride-hail drivers and bicycle and motorcycle delivery riders—who do not have a standard employment relationship but work through digital platforms is becoming common today, reflecting labor-market tendencies throughout the world. These are not free of tensions, revealing the plasticity of work situations and actors’ varying views with regard to control and the autonomy they enjoy at work. A shift in focus, away from prevailing categories, proves indispensable.

One characteristic of digital platforms is the very great rapidity with which they evolve and grow. It did not, for example, take more than five years for Brazilian takeaway delivery platform iFood to establish a quasi-monopoly over the sector. In this sense, digital platforms too are emergent figures on the entrepreneurial landscape, constructed by buying the start-ups that actually encountered and resolved the teething problems, enabling the leading examples to become multinational undertakings.

The question of time is central also to the management of these enterprises, as reflected in the jet-ski metaphor deployed by one of the directors of the platform: rather than launching a liner and finding out only afterwards whether the operation was a success, which all takes a long time, the firm prefers to launch a jet-ski, and if the trial is unpersuasive, to pull out straight away, saving both time and money. In this way, rather than sub-contract the day-to-day management of deliveries, the firm, famous for its flexibility, decided to franchise this operational aspect to legally independent businesses.^[21]

In addition, taking proper account of the lived experience and explicit declarations of actors, who can also be thought of as emergent figures, helps avoid any tendency to introduce ideology into the argument, contrary to all the heuristic requirements of sociological research.

Furthermore, while underlining the limits of a legal approach, the triple characterization of emergent figures presented here invites attention to the relationship with the political. This opens the way to a more comprehensive and wide-ranging analysis that can allow for the idea of discoherence, that is, of ruptures in the meshing together of practices. The institutionalization of a practice is not automatic, being dependent on the political—on account of the tensions associated with it—for its acceptance as a norm by stakeholders, that is, the institutions and actors of different kinds involved to varying degrees in the construction of regulatory frameworks and so in the regulation of work and employment.

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