Corinne Siino^[1]

Abstract

Under the guise of flexible working or otherwise, we see today an increasing variability of times and places of work, a corollary of the organizational and geographical fragmentation of production consequent upon outsourcing and globalization. At the same time, with the ongoing development of ICTs, the increasingly “teleworkable” and hence individualized character of work activity, activity that is furthermore carried out at places not specifically identified with work, results in the alternation and overlap of times and places of work and of personal life, extending sometimes to their hybridization. The resulting multipurpose character of times and places can in some cases lead to ambiguity, a blurring of the distinctions between work and non-work on the one hand and between different employment statuses on the other. While this may be exploited by employers/clients, it also provides workers with opportunities to reconfigure their patterns of work to suit themselves, laying the basis for a new, more satisfactory relationship to work.

This chapter first reviews the institutional developments that have led to the deinstitutionalization of the place and time of work. It then draws on research carried out in Toulouse and Marseille to consider workers’ expectations of and adaptations to the new styles of working that have emerged. Not all sectors of the workforce are affected in the same way or benefit to the same extent, adding a new dimension to socio-occupational inequality. The presentation hopefully illustrates, in addition, how the notion of the gray zone and the non-institutional approach to the dynamics of work and employment associated with it help grasp these changes in working life. 
   
Keywords: Time and place of work; labor market inequalities; gray zones; individualization of employment status; work-life boundaries.

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Introduction

This chapter interprets certain gray zones in work and employment as the consequence of changes in the time and place of work. It will argue that the replacement of the singular workplace by a variety of places of work has led to a blurring of boundaries not only between employment and self-employment but also between work and non-work, as work is no longer easily identifiable by reference to the time spent at a single, distinctive location. The more or less rapid alternation and even overlap of work and life activities at one or more locations not specifically dedicated to work, but nonetheless used for it—be it a hotel in the case of employees traveling for work (Dubois, Ravalet, and Kaufman 2015), or the home in the case of teleworkers or the self-employed—has blurred once clear distinctions between the times and places of work and those of the rest of everyday life (shopping, socializing, recreation . . . ). This more ambiguous character of working time, which can sometimes even accommodate non-work activities, represents a significant change in the conditions under which work is carried out, leading sometimes to the disappearance of what had been typical work situations and the appearance of new ones. This ambiguity is the result of two developments.

Firstly, the mode of reorganization of production that has been called “hyper-industrialization” (Veltz 2017) requires the coordination or synchronization of times of work at every level—from the international to the local for the big corporation, and thence down to employees and self-employed contract workers, with consequences for the pace and pattern of workers’ everyday lives. The individualized and variable working times that have become increasingly prevalent reflect the pressures on workers’ employers or clients (henceforward employers/clients), constantly concerned to respond as quickly and as sensitively as possible to global market conditions (Veltz 2020). They are also the consequence of the new spatial organization of production that results from the labor involved in a product or service no longer being contained within the formal limits of the firm chiefly responsible but being distributed among a multiplicity of sites and associated working environments that are unknown in advance and may vary over time, giving rise to the “productive configurations” theorized by D’Amours et al. (2023).

The weakening of Fordist regulation in the industrial sector that began with the outsourcing of certain services (cleaning, maintenance, administration) in the 1990s and has since accelerated with the advent of the gig economy (which notably profited, in France, from the introduction in 2009 of a new fiscal and administrative regime for single-person businesses^[2]) means that in many industries workers are no longer required to gather together at the employer’s premises. The growing use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for remote working, firstly with e-mail and the internet and later the development of digital platforms (e.g. for secretarial services, home delivery, or even medical services) created the need and/or opportunity to work flexible hours, at home, in the office, or elsewhere. Times of work and non-work alternate more easily and more frequently when workers no longer move to a separate location for work, and, without radical breaks between them, may sometimes even meld into a (hybrid) continuity. Many now habitually work at two or more locations, which may vary with the requirements of the task in hand. Such developments also reflect workers’ widely shared desire for more autonomy in the organization of work and a better balance between work, travel-time, leisure-time, and family life.

The argument here is that employment arrangements are becoming increasingly complex, to the point that traditional criteria—working hours, place of work, skill, and mode of remuneration—are no longer effective for the determination of employment status; and that this has resulted in the emergence of a gray zone, an indeterminacy of both time and place of work that in some circumstances allows their reconfiguration by workers to better suit their own needs, laying the basis for a new, more satisfactory relationship to work. In this respect, the gray zone can be seen as a nursery for novel forms of work relations (in terms of types of long-term co-operation or punctual collaboration, or ways of combining employment and self-employment) more or less institutionalized and durable.

To document these transformations, we begin in the first section with a review of the time of work (working time and hours of work, i.e. the amount of time devoted to work, on the one hand, and its temporal distribution on the other) and the many institutional developments that have led to the blurring of distinctions between employment, third-party employment, and self-employment that has sometimes brought about change or variation in the location of work (Letourneux 2020). The second section explores how some workers’ ability to reconfigure the times and hours of work and private life in view of their varying attitudes to travel for and in work changes their relationship to work. We then look at the expectations and impacts associated with these new, fluid and still-developing work situations. Differences in these across sectors and occupational categories introduce new dimensions of socio-occupational inequality not registered by current measures. In conclusion, we sum up the dynamics involved in the generation of gray zones today and reflect on the heuristic value of the concept. Throughout, we rely for evidence on a personal interview survey of Marseille-based staff responsible for promoting the integration into the labor market of disadvantaged groups (carried out as part of the ANR ZOGRIS project)^[3] and a series of interviews with Toulouse-based teleworkers working either from home or from other remote locations: interviews with 66 workers carried out before COVID as part of a POPSU study^[4] and interviews with 27 carried out after COVID as part of a VILAGIL project.^[5] All three surveys focused on the reorganization of the time and place of work accompanying the shift from workplace to home.

1. Developments and Uncertainties Regarding the Time and Place of Work

1.1. Understanding and defining working time(s)

Any attempt to investigate working time—that is, to define the object of investigation and to determine its temporal and spatial contours—has to have regard for the many different forms that work now takes. The legislative frameworks that officially define and regulate work have things to say about time and place, but the term “working time”, as used here, simply means the time a person actually spends on an activity in expectation of an income, without regard to employment status or any legal or regulatory definition. Even so, the identification of time spent on work is still subject to uncertainty, given possible doubts regarding the real character or goal of the activity in question.

The use of ICTs in production, information exchange and control—these last conceivably continuous and instantaneous thanks to the development of technology—has not only markedly accelerated the pace of work but also introduced a certain fragmentation, with the possibility of work on the task in hand being interrupted for the sake of another, more urgent (Isaac, Campoy, and Kalika 2007). The proliferation of remote working tools since the 1990s has led to the rise of nomadic workers who prefer to sit alone on trains (Frétigny 2011) or in cafés or other public spaces, rather than go to the office, and of teleworking from home—new styles of work whose emergence has significantly impacted negotiation over the time and place of work. The reconfiguration of the relationship to time within the firm has also led to potential problems for individuals’ management of their non-work time. Telework, for example, might be interrupted by an urgent private matter (such as a medical appointment or a family emergency), only to have to be resumed during time dedicated in principle to private life, generating a sense of lack of control over one’s own life (Rosa 2012) that is exacerbated by the impact of ICTs (Cingolani 2021).

The introduction of broadband and WiFi has made it possible for growing numbers of workers in certain categories to work remotely, avoiding travel to the traditional workplace (Moriset 2004, 2011). In January 2021, 27 per cent of employees in France were teleworking, compared to just 4 per cent in 2019, while eight in ten employees wanted to carry on working remotely at least part of the time after the end of the COVID pandemic (DARES 2021). Welcomed for different reasons by both employers and employees, this development calls for a rethinking of the rules for identifying and measuring work. Under the Fordist model, employee remuneration was based on skill, responsibility, and the time spent engaged in production on company premises. The multiple uncertainties that arise from the loss of this last criterion offer a first field of investigation: to what extent, if any, may the changing relations between status (employment, third-party employment, self-employment, etc.) and the times and locations of work of different kinds (Letourneux 2020) lead to changes in workers’ relationships to work? The emergence within employment of the alternation and overlap of work and non-work in the course of the working day that was once characteristic of self-employment adds to the difficulties of characterizing the work situation the uncertainty of distinguishing work time from non-work time. Though hard to quantify in terms of the number of persons affected, these developments have led in places to a deregulation of work and employment that has had a significant impact on the world of work, though without prompting any organized reaction. Yet, aside from the employment relationship itself, there are still few rules or standards pertaining to the classification of activities as work. This haziness around work itself suggests the utility of an analysis in terms of a gray zone deriving from changes in the time and place of work.

1.2. What is meant by working time?

Working time is defined in the European Community (and also, still, the United Kingdom) as “any period during which the worker is working at the employer’s disposal and carrying out his activity or duties in accordance with national laws and/or practice”.^[6] We see, then, that this very definition of working time excludes the use of paid working hours to attend to personal matters. French national legislation in fact provides for a 35-hour working week but a maximum 10-hour working day, making for the possibility of working days of unequal—that is, varying—length.^[7] Internationally, the new millennium has furthermore seen the proliferation of legislative reforms that tend toward the decentralization of regulation,^[8] with norms set through company-level bargaining rather than by national law, so tending to align the Global North more closely with the Global South, where working time has been much more rarely subject to legislation. With individual agreements that fix the number of days worked but set no limit on hours worked in the day, and that take little account of the volume of work to be done and the number of people available to do it, working conditions formerly associated only with senior management are increasingly being imposed on those below them. While the French national time-use survey registered a twenty-minute reduction in time worked per day (by employees) between 1999 and 2010 (Martin 2022), many recent studies have highlighted the mutual permeation of times and the temporal overlap of work-related and non-work-related activities, such as working while eating or finishing work during “free time” at home. Such developments put into question the utility of measurement of work by the clock. Given all this, flexible working hours are no longer associated only with part-time, half-time, temporary or other atypical forms of employment (Boufartigue 2012) or with the day-to-day variation of starting and finishing times imposed on certain kinds of low-skilled workers. In our surveys, low-skilled women with children to look after preferred to work very early in the morning at cleaning or warehouse jobs and to sometimes supplement this waged employment with other work done at varying times of their own choosing, rather than to do the same job in the evening or at the weekend.

The diversification of working times and hours described here helps explain two tendencies. Firstly, the individualization (that is, differentiation) of working time and remuneration within industries and within occupational groups has made France’s national statistical categories and those used by its government employment services less precise in their description of the realities of work and income.^[9] As a result, the design of public policy regarding the regulation of employment is becoming less effective (Bisom-Rapp and Coiquaud 2017) and can indeed itself be seen as a factor in the creation of gray zones (Carelli, Cingolani, and Kesselman 2022). Secondly, the growth of remote work allows or requires certain sections of the workforce to work times and hours that vary on a daily or other basis, as may the location of work. The resulting fluidity or malleability of work situation (in terms of employment status, time and location) has consequences for private life, allowing workers (or indeed their employers/clients) to manipulate the time of work and take advantage of the potential temporal overlap of working and private life. This diversification and indetermination of the time of work has led to the emergence of uncanonical styles of work and life that can only be described as “gray”. In fact, the uncertainty of expectations regarding a working time no longer defined by legal regulations leaves room for interpretations that can vary with the person, the moment, and the wider circumstances of work. Furthermore, the recognition of time as working time (or not) of course has an impact on the pay that is the correlate of the work whose limits are no longer definitively fixed.

1.3. The many aspects of the diversification of working time

There is still uniformity of working times and hours in the public sector and in those branches of industry where Fordist production still prevails, e.g. for those on open-ended (permanent) contracts in the agri-foods or automobile industries. But times and hours can be highly variable in certain branches of the service sector and many workers—whether declared or undeclared, notionally employed or self-employed—work hours that bear little relation, in quantity and/or pattern, to the hours for which they are formally paid.

Working time and its remuneration used to serve as the basis for the distinction between self-employment, with its unpredictable hours, and the waged employment characterized by pre-defined hours and rates of pay. Even in standard employment, however, contracts increasingly make no reference to hours worked in their provisions for the determination of remuneration, so blurring that distinction. The loss of the link between time and pay can lead to a certain indeterminacy, fostering the emergence, expansion and complexification of gray zones. This is the case in retail, for example, where hours and times worked are governed by sales targets that workers do not themselves decide. The same goes for many senior executives in the private sector (engineers, sales managers, etc.) whose pay depends on personal targets set by the company, and this in the context of a competitive intra-company environment, encouraging them to tailor their own working times and hours to the employer’s advantage. This also goes for certain public sector managers, whose increasing workloads demand ever more time on the job, time that may or may not be paid for, depending on the department or service in question. The situation is similar in universities, public research establishments and hospitals, where taking on responsibilities as a head of department or project leader in addition to those of one’s own job may or may not bring a corresponding increase in remuneration, depending on local practice and the balance of power.

This diversity of work situation and remuneration within socio-occupational categories and sectors of activity indicates how important the question of working time may be in negotiations between workers and employers/clients. Similarly significant is the question of the recognition as working time of time spent, for example, on travel and/or other activities linked to the task in hand, arrangements for which, in fact, vary a great deal. The emergence of a variety of systems for measuring and recording the time devoted to a given activity was one early reflection of the weakening of subordination within employment (Supiot 2000). In addition, working time is now less frequently identified with time spent at a single location, the workplace, as it was in the heyday of Fordism. This “‘delocalization’ of the labor process” is said to be responsible for “a blurring of the boundaries between work and private life resulting from the fact that work takes place at home (Dumas and Ruiller 2014; Metzger 2009)” (Letourneux 2020). The formerly distinct spaces occupied by the different activities of everyday life are increasingly tending to interweave and sometimes even to fuse. This last we see in the case of influencers who gain an income from posting content on digital platforms, just as others may engage in on-line selling from home without ever thinking of it as work.

The identification of working time under these conditions depends, on the one hand, on the recognition and remuneration of time spent on certain activities by those on whose behalf they are carried out, and, on the other, on the expectation of remuneration on the part of those engaged in the activity, a subjective factor that comes into play when working time is no longer defined by presence at a designated location. Thus, the general fluidity of status and circumstance associated with a pattern of activity that sees successive spells of work carried out at different locations and in different contexts also sees the proliferation of situations in which, for example, periods of subordinate work alternate with periods of self-directed, independent activity that may or may not be carried out in expectation of an income (Cingolani 2021). Product demonstrators active on social media illustrate the complexification and individualization of the relationship between time, place, and remuneration, offering a first demonstration of the heuristic utility of a notion of “gray zone” in identifying as working time the time spent on an activity in expectation of reward, without regard to institutional definition. Such situations must count as work in the sense of gaining an income despite falling outside the bounds of legal formalization.

2. Working Time: The Emergence of a Gray Zone in Employment Status

2.1. The attenuation of the Fordist norm of work: more than the blurring of the distinction between employment and self-employment

Any comparison between the Fordist period, when working arrangements were stable for most, with the present and its flexible working times and hours, has to look at differences in the organization of production and their impact on workers’ relationships to work. The gradual rapprochement of employment and self-employment that we are witnessing highlights the significance of the distinction not always made between working time in the sense of hours actually worked and the working time formally recognized and remunerated as such.

Until the late 1970s, in the Global North, both large-scale industrial enterprises and public authorities, concerned for the stability or easy replacement of the workforce, sought to facilitate access to employment, in doing so promoting the formation of working-class neighborhoods (Coing 1982). However, the gradual outsourcing of certain industrial tasks under a variety of contractual arrangements and the globalization of the production of goods and services have since made access to stable employment more difficult for some of the workforce of the North. At the same time, the categories of unemployment, employment, and non-participation as defined and deployed by the ILO have come to offer an increasingly inaccurate representation of the labor market. Thus, workers categorized as part-time employees may in fact be working under different employment statuses, both as employees and as self-employed, in order to gain an adequate income, while those categorized as full-time self-employed workers may work under a variety of different statuses in parallel, as temporary workers, self-employed tradesmen or professionals, contractors or undeclared workers. “The new space of self-employment is difficult to quantify for a number of reasons. Firstly, because we know little about the structure of self-employed work. Secondly, because it is a space marked by precarity, where workers occupy unstable and rapidly changing niches . . . the nature of the clients they work for is changing, and sometimes deliberately muddied. . . . Finally, work situations vary a great deal, on the one hand often being characterized by great constraint, as in the case of digital platform workers, and on the other, offering highly skilled workers an opportunity to gain a supplementary income” (Gros 2019). Underemployment, or the quasi-unemployment described by Bessone, Cabannes, and Marrakchi (2016) as the “halo around unemployment”—unstable statuses, being most often involuntary—represent a constantly shifting gray zone in the labor market (Dubet 2019), characterized by a hybridization or simultaneity of statuses. Indeed, variability of status is sometimes a prerequisite for retaining work or earning sufficient money, and such hybridization may serve to stabilize workers’ ability to gain an income.

Project managers working in Marseille to promote the integration into the workforce of low-skilled workers spoke of people employed by businesses or voluntary sector organizations (to provide personal or business services, as maintenance workers or home helps), who would occasionally undertake work on their own account—officially declared or not—within the limits of time, location and expense that they considered acceptable in terms of the additional income it represented. This alternation of journeys and locations is also to be seen among skilled workers who willingly or otherwise regularly combine employment with self-employment, such as secretaries who undertake document capture or other secretarial tasks on a freelance basis, or staff architects who also provide services in their personal capacity. In our investigation of co-working spaces in Toulouse, we found that some of those employed to manage or supervise them also engaged in work on their own account at the same time. Again, employees able to work remotely for their primary employer might also visit co-working spaces, when not working for them, to do freelance work for another firm or even to undertake voluntary work. Other studies have identified a category of economically dependent independent workers (Mondon 2014) who are formally employed for part of their work while carrying out other tasks for the same firm as self-employed.

The existence of these varied combinations of employments, often as means to ensure a sufficient or optimal income, contributes to the difficulty of defining appropriate labor-market categories. The increasingly common phenomenon of multiple jobholding exemplifies both the difficulty of distinguishing between different work activities when these are not associated with distinctive locations, and an emergent, hybrid employment status that might perhaps be called engagement rather than employment. It is these trends in the matter of time, place, and status that make for the complexity of the gray zones in which the time of work is constantly being reshaped. A complexity that leads to the unreliability of statistics that can no longer identify employment status or branch of production on the basis of standard locations and working conditions.

2.2. A gray zone generated by the variability of working times and arrangements

The variability of time and place makes it difficult, then—for researchers, public authorities, and indeed workers themselves—to categorize work situations that deviate from the norm, as when freelancers combine declared and undeclared work, or employees, willingly or unwillingly, work unpaid hours, or work on their own account as well. More generally, the informal individualization and diversification of the times and locations of production changes workers’ relationship to work, and also leads to “standard” employment coming to more closely resemble third-party employment or self-employment, all this making work itself more difficult to define and identify than under Fordism.

While the measure of work under the Fordist regulation of production was (continuous) time spent at a (single) location, the deregulation of working times and hours in employment has seen the return of the task as the means of defining and measuring work done. Limits on time and constraints on location tend to vanish, just as continuity of time and place are irrelevant to the self-employed, given the contractual specification of deadlines rather than of hours to be worked. The resulting ambiguities have necessitated changes in the way work is organized. Individualized management and the frequent alteration of hours worked both contribute to a desynchronization of the workforce as staff negotiate their own working times and locations and even employment status. These new dynamics allow workers and their employers/clients to compromise on or circumvent labor standards, norms of pay and hours, and targets to be met over a period. Such negotiations, often carried out individually, are part of a strategic repositioning of workers and employers/clients regarding the conditions under which—and in consideration of which—work is done. The individualized hours of work characteristic of these arrangements more closely resemble the patterns of work of the self-employed than those of the traditional workforce that gathers daily at the employer’s premises. They represent, however, only a very partial slackening of subordination and no more than a minor gain in independence when the contract of employment is modified only so far as to allow for working from home or other forms of telework. So we are not, in fact, witnessing a fusion or conflation of employment and self-employment, or of formal and informal employment, but rather a single overarching shift that encompasses to varying degrees workers of every employment status across numerous occupations, together with the emergence of styles of work that escape all legal categorization.

The notion of the gray zone developed in response to this wide-ranging phenomenon helps account for relationships to work that are sometimes determined not so much by the work itself as by the advantages or disadvantages to the worker of the conditions in which it is carried out. As government employment services (unemployment offices, training organizations, etc.) and the schemes they sponsor leave users little or no scope to negotiate improved terms, some workers respond to their inadequate incomes by taking on undeclared work in addition to their official work, under whatever status. This shifting through different segments of the labor market and workers’ eventual settling in one or more­—or in some intermediate space between—represents, in fact, an effort to manage or optimize the times and places of work. The combination of work situations offered by private sector employers or organized and coordinated by government, on the one hand, with those tailored to their own ends by workers makes the determination of an individual’s work situation problematic, contributing to changes in public conceptions of work that themselves contribute to the development of gray zones.

3. Are Changes to the Time and Place of Work Leading to Work’s Disappearance?

The use of one’s skills to do an odd job here and there, against remuneration (though perhaps without any more explicit contract) but outside work and at a location not exclusively dedicated to work, could be said to occupy a middle ground between work and leisure. Workers’ own private space and urban public spaces are indeed increasingly serving as locations for white collar remote work (Marzloff 2013). One of our interviewees in Marseille spoke of people who occasionally cooked or did odd repair jobs for people, at home or elsewhere, without this being their occupation, but simply something done in their spare time, remunerated or otherwise. Mostly blue- or white-collar workers or housewives, such people did not wish to become formally self-employed, nor would this be possible, for want of training or qualifications, or because of family circumstances that made it necessary to work only when and where convenient and for people of one’s own choice.

In the case of the most highly-skilled workers, Burret (2013) suggests that work arrangements such as those offered by collaborative spaces foster the emergence of initiatives informed by the values ​​of autonomous, non-subordinate work (Lallement 2015), drawing on “motivational energies and subjective capacities and being tailored to subjects’ proper times, their individual rhythms and spatio-temporal requirements” (Rosa 2010). The generalization of ICTs and the increasing individualization of both work and life similarly promotes the rapprochement of working life and private life in the case of workers who, thanks to technical skills acquired in their leisure time (crafts, IT) are able to offer paid services—e.g. creating blogs, software training, assistance in dealing with on-line interfaces—to individuals or firms. Growing in volume, these activities taking place at multiple locations not forming part of the traditional framework of production (home, shared workshop, co-working space, fab lab, etc.) represent a gray area in terms of their official status as work. The failure of place as the key to distinguishing between work and non-work activity has been a major factor in the constitution and expansion of the gray zone. This has been reinforced by the growth of teleworking, as the flexibility of time and location it offers has created new opportunities for workers to collaborate with others, on a formal or informal basis, alongside employment or replacing it altogether. The changing or unstable character of these voluntary non-work collaborations, can nonetheless involve the institution of contractual, pecuniary relations. That presents a difficulty for any attempt to clarify, redefine or indeed do away altogether with the concept of work.

Just before Covid struck, certain self-employed workers who made at least some use of co-working spaces in the outskirts of Toulouse were networking with others in similar spaces in other French cities and abroad, to discuss matters of common concern or to find partners to collaborate on informally organized projects. During lockdown, the existence of these informal collaborations was decisive in the emergence of a digital co-working space, that is, an expanded, virtual space open to users anywhere.^[10] The use of this virtual place for remote collaboration led to paid contracts for people who had initially collaborated on a voluntary basis. One result was the recategorization as work of some such collaborations and with that the elaboration of at least temporary frameworks and rules for joint projects. These ad hoc collaborations supported by the use of ICTs thus generated a new institutional framework, a hybrid of cooperative and platform, work for which was defined not just by the production of a product or the provision of a service but also in terms of individual contribution to the common project, while the nature of the location where activity was carried out could also affect its categorization as work or not. A certain “elasticity” of time and place in teleworking introduces the possibility of informal collaborations with others that may call for the institution of contractual, pecuniary relations, one example of the more or less institutionalized and more or less durable changes to work taking place in the gray zone.

This kind of indeterminacy regarding work was typically to be found in the fields of culture, the arts, communications, information technology, and engineering services for business, but it is now spreading to other sectors as well. Furthermore, alongside the simple desire to work away from the office, there is also another phenomenon, known as the Great Resignation or the Big Quit: the partial or total departure from the labor market of those unattracted or disappointed by the promises attached to work. The proliferation of different forms and conditions of work and income-generation is fostered too by a desire for recognition and for meaningful work that has driven the emergence of a variety of working patterns more closely adapted to the demands and values of private life, leading sometimes, indeed, to the abandonment of regular, formal work. While this is to be found among all occupational categories, the balance of advantage and disadvantage arising from these forms of “autonomy” remains unclear, particularly for those with fewer skills or qualifications. In this respect, the gray zone can be seen as a nursery for novel forms of work relations (in terms of types of long-term co-operation or punctual collaboration, or ways of combining employment and self-employment) more or less institutionalized and durable.

Consideration of the time and place of work thus yields a picture of the gray zone as fostering relationships to work that valorize autonomy and flexibility of time and location, factors that are now taking their place alongside remuneration as the expected recompense of productive activity.

Conclusion

The reconfiguration of work in accordance with highly individualized and individualistic logics has correspondingly diversified its times and locations. Amplified by certain workers or employers who seek to take advantage of the uncertainty of the boundary between work and non-work, this diversification has made work difficult to identify when no longer temporally and spatially circumscribed, while employment status becomes similarly difficult to pin down. These two factors count for much in the constitution of the gray zone, making work situations more opaque and recalcitrant to institutional classification.

Reflection on the time and place of work suggests that the gray zone corresponds to the situation in which, in the regulatory gap or vacuum created by the dismantling of labor regulation, personal factors are coming to play a significant role in people’s relationship to their de-regulated work. The replacement of formally regulated factors such as status and pay by more personal criteria (e.g., residence, family life, social networks, availability of public transport or access to public or private financial support) leads to unclarity and ambiguity, but can at the same time promote the emergence of novel types of work situation that may become normalized. Individuals’ situations exert their own weight in the relationship of forces between workers and their employers/clients, informing negotiation goals that contribute to the formation of gray zones. Flexibility of time and place of work allows employers to optimize their use of the workforce, while enabling workers to minimize, so far as possible, the most negative consequences of the shortage of paid work. Consideration of the issues of time, location and mobility associated with work reveals, as one might expect, that inequalities between the top and bottom of the socio-occupational pyramid have not been reduced by increasing flexibility, which has rather led to a cross-cutting segmentation of categories in terms of individuals’ ability to free themselves of the constraints of collectivity (e.g. of family or standard workplace) and so to take advantage of it.

Within each category, and more particularly among very highly or very low-skilled workers, jobs are chosen on the basis of the living conditions that they afford. In these two cases, in which workers are very much in control of their own working conditions, on the one hand, or very little, on the other, the advantage of the gray zone, as concept or tool, is that it enables discussion of the new dynamics regarding the rhythm, duration, territorialization and location of work that are governed by relationships of forces rather than being formally regulated, or emerge in the context of fluid and non-institutionalized arrangements (D’Amours et al. 2023; Cingolani 2014). The accompanying shift of focus from socio-occupational inequality proper to social inequality more generally reveals new kinds of relationships to work and highlights the unequal importance of work in the stabilization of individuals’ social situations. Yet neither government nor unions have undertaken much, if any, cross-cutting analysis of inequalities in the circumstances in which work takes place. Gray zones are thus largely the outcome of conditions of work devised (under constraint) by workers themselves in an effort to counter or to limit as much as possible the destabilization of their social situations in the face of the inadequacies of public policy. But they can also be seen as driving and revealing the margins of capacity generated by the fragmentation and/or reconfiguration of work situations. The heuristic power of the notion of the gray zone lies in what it enables us to see in the transformations of work and employment discussed here.

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