Patrick Cingolani and Donna Kesselman

We find ourselves at a turning point, not so much entering a new stage of capitalism as facing the emergence of a new world spawned by that capitalism. In discussing the Industrial Revolution, E.P. Thompson often remarked that it did violence to human nature;^[1] we are today witnessing an upheaval of the same kind. What Thompson was seeking to capture was the intimate connection between work and life and the interrelated changes in each, and for him, the “violent technological differentiation between work and life” was another aspect of class violence (Thompson 1966, 446). Like the Industrial Revolution, today’s digital revolution represents a “total social fact”, as Mauss would say, that informs and organizes every sphere of society, yielding a changed world again marked by “the loss of any felt cohesion in the community, save that which the working people, in antagonism to their labour and to their masters, built for themselves” (Thompson 1966, 447).

Initially designating a blurring of the boundary between the formal and the informal in employment, the notion of the “gray zone” can now help us understand the complex and multidimensional effects of the digital revolution. As later developed, it refers to those aspects of work that are no longer defined by shared norms. The absence or breakdown of such norms is common right across a labor market that is seeing work and employment reconfigured worldwide. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, initially confined to Europe and its colonial extensions, the digital revolution is global in its impact. The value of the gray zone approach lies in its ability to capture the changes it brings and the tensions and contradictions they entail. Gray zones are indicators of how well or badly the Fordist regime and its panoply of worker protections are faring amid the upheaval. They reflect, too, the resistance offered to the changes that are sweeping the globe. To track them is to witness how new patterns of work and life emerge, either to become institutionalized or to vanish again, perhaps after hovering uncertainly for some time before doing either. Gray zones offer an opportunity to study these new patterns and their impending eventualities in their global circulation, to compare and contrast between and within national economies.

How Gray Zones Arise

The breakdown of the distinctions represented by the customary binaries—of employment vs. self-employment, subordination vs. autonomy, formal vs. informal, or the precarity of the Global North vs. the informality of the South—has seen the development of countless new gray areas, not only in employment but also in many other work situations. It is, however, these traditional categories that not only still inform institutional and scholarly practice but also underpin the social distribution of wealth in capitalist countries. In particular, the now blurred distinction between the two canonical figures of Fordism—the subordinated employee and the independent contractor (Supiot, 2000)—still serves to regulate access to social protection and to characterize power relations at work. Such blurring has also occurred in the Global South, where the social state emerged only belatedly, bringing with it genuine, though fragile rights. The conflict that pits long-term corporate agendas against the efforts of labor organizations and, sometimes, public authorities, to preserve the legal framework of employment and the rights associated with it—in other words, the struggle over the legacy of the tripartite social state—is the main source of the gray zone in work and employment. The first part of this book is accordingly entitled “Class Struggle in the Gray Zone: Resistances and Alternatives in the Face of Technological Rupture”. This explores how gray areas have emerged in key aspects of standard employment—the basis of trade union work today—so contributing to the growing field of gray zone research (Bellemare et al. 2024; Bureau, Corsani, and Giraud 2024; Carelli, Cingolani, and Kesselman 2022; Bureau et al. 2019; Boulin and Kesselman 2018; Bureau and Dieuaide 2018; Azaïs and Carleial 2017; Siino and Soussi 2017).

Tendencies already under way have been much exacerbated by the advent of digital platforms, disrupting and recasting the mechanisms of subordination, of power at work and the rights and duties that constrained it. One might say: the whole social construction of work. Gray zones are thus also to be found elsewhere than in the attenuation of the standard employment regulated by state institutions characteristic of the Fordist age (Dieuaide, 2024). These other gray zones relate to market transactions, as platforms seek to institute their own norms and with them create new types of workers adapted to their needs. Power relations here are quite different in character from those embodied in the standard employment relationship. In its reflection of dispersed market forces, algorithmic management marks a radical break with the institutional stability of employment (Dieuaide and Azaïs 2020). Platforms’ promotion of a new kind of work—digital labor—is reflected in the emergence of the “self-employed entrepreneur” (Casilli 2015). The uberized, self-employed worker is the default inhabitant of the platforms’ digital world; their construct, this figure is now embedded across Global North and South alike. The second part of the book is thus entitled “The Digital Gray Zone: Platform Practices, Tactics, Uses and Abuses”. It explores how platforms set about imposing a historically new mode of organization of work, seeking to inaugurate a “platform capitalism” (Srnicek 2016). Platforms’ successful efforts to establish themselves as “rule makers” (Azaïs, Dieuaide and Kesselman 2017) testify to the radically political character of platformization, from their interventions in government decision-making to the commodification of ever-wider spheres of life and society and their “colonization” of workers’ everyday lives (Cingolani 2021).

Confronted by the mutations and tensions of capitalism and their effects on work, from the neoliberal undoing of standard employment to the technological upheavals of today, digitalization among them, we want to insist on workers’ central role in the reconfiguration of work and employment, as themselves actors in the historical process. The third part of the book, entitled “Emergent Figures in the Gray Zone,” looks at what we call “agency within domination”, at the many ways in which workers deal with the new and worsening imbalance between digital capital and labor. Some have responded to the asymmetry between platforms and users^[2] that arises from the digital mediation of relations by devising ways to turn platforms to their own individual or collective advantage. They stand at one end of a spectrum at whose other end stands the self-employed entrepreneur thoroughly uberized in spirit and practice, the space between being populated by a host of figures seeking to regain, outside the relationship of subordination, the advantages won by the workers of the past. We have identified, then, three basic cases:

• those who invest in the matching system,^[3] engaging with it on its own terms and often finding themselves trapped by it;
• those who appropriate the matching system, using it to their own benefit, in their work or personal lives;
• those who, while engaging with these systems, are opening up and developing spaces of contestation and struggle—forming independent workers’ associations and contributing in this way to the revitalization of trade unionism, or by setting up their own platforms on a self-managed, co-operative basis.

Gray zones, then, are not merely the result of the breakdown of Fordism or the onslaught of platform capitalism. They are shaped as well by the practices and tactics of the working class, of precarious workers themselves, who seek to turn the tool of the digital to their own advantage. This exercise of agency still has to face formidable challenges in the increasingly acute asymmetries of power that characterize digital capitalism.

1. Class Struggle in the Gray Zone: Resistances and Alternatives in the Face of Technological Rupture

Fordism relied on the welfare state—the embodiment of a certain balance of power between unions, employers, and the state that was its ultimate arbiter—that reached its developed form in the post-war years. The social contract that underlay it, which exchanged subordination against protection, was leveraged by the unions to embed in public regulation the social gains they had won. The “wage-earning society” whose historical emergence in France was described by Castel (2002) was based on the primacy of a standard employment relationship that identified work with a specified workplace and a specified time, and that entailed a degree of social protection and a certain social status—a world and an identity. However distinct from family life it might be, employment was intimately entangled with it via the public services and the redistribution of wealth that were its institutional counterpart.

The figure of the algorithmically-managed, self-employed entrepreneur has been carefully crafted by the platforms as a means to undercut the (relatively) politically and socially empowered employee. The force of the digital revolution, the driver of accelerating change, is reflected in an extreme asymmetry of tempo: the tripartite institutional framework of unions, employers and state and its legacy of labor law and collective bargaining, for decades the settled institutional background to life, has been plunged into crisis by digitalization in only a few years. Capitalism is taking advantage of this asymmetry to actively intervene in the dynamics of societal transformation, reinforcing its own devastating antagonisms.

The digital age promoted by the platforms would do away with Fordism and its employment-based rights and protections through the “uberization of everything”. It holds out the insidiously seductive promise that workers can free themselves of the burdens of subordination and create their own, personal work-life balance. This is an ideal, however, that undermines the basis of their collective struggle as a class. The tentacular, centrifugal forces of platformization erode the standard employment relationship through the creation of what have come to be called gray zones: gray areas where institutional clarity used to be. The first part of the book thus examines this process in detail, considering different elements of the employment relationship in turn: the legal and institutional framework; the relationship of subordination and its judicial determination; the form of remuneration; and the time and place of work.

Gray Zones in the Legal and Institutional Framework of Employment, North and South

Legal scholars in this volume examine the multiple, interconnected aspects of the de-standardization of employment, and how the business model of the digital platforms takes deliberate advantage of defects and lacunae in the regulatory framework. In this respect, the digitalization of work has produced a degree of institutional instability in labor markets worldwide. Grounded in empirical analysis of developments in Brazil, where the phenomenon is very marked, this concept developed by legal scholars Sayonara Grillo and José Luiz Soares captures the intersecting effects of two key factors: neoliberal austerity policy on the one hand and the acceleration of legal time on the other. There, neo-liberalism’s agenda of “permanent reform”, dismantling employment rights and the institutional foundations of labor’s collective power, has enmeshed the law in continuous dispute, so undermining the very foundations of legal certainty. This instability is compounded by digital platforms’ efforts to elude employment legislation through “new forms of illegality”, notably by taking advantage of the “time of non-regulation” that exists between the platforms’ introduction of new forms of work and the law’s taking cognizance of them, constantly adapting their models, even, to circumvent court decisions. They take advantage, in particular, of the poverty and economic fragility of the Global South to embrace its historically dominant informal sector within the broader dynamic of uberization (see Ludmila Abilio’s chapter here). In this suspension of legal norms, work and work relationships again become subject to unmediated private power. In a betrayal of their democratic vocation, public institutions have allowed the naturalization of normative insecurity. Institutional instability thus both reflects and reinforces the gray zone in work and employment.

Has there been a supranational response to the juggernaut of uberization? The European Union’s attempt to grant rights to platform workers, through its recent Directive on Improving Working Conditions in Platform Work ([EU] 2024/2831), is itself an instance of the gray zone, says French legal scholar Claire Marzo. In its adoption of the presumption of employment, the EU put itself forward as the guardian of that status and of the rights associated with it. However, rather than imposing clear obligations, as in matters of health and safety or the 40-hour week, it left implementation to Member States and their courts, creating gray areas that allow the presumption to be evaded. The Directive also creates pathbreaking digital rights, yet by according these to persons per se, rather than employees or even workers, it raises the prospect of the deinstitutionalization of the social protection of workers by law. What is more, the Directive’s gray zones may ultimately result in the increase in the number of workers formally self-employed and without the protections of standard employment that the presumption was intended to counter.

Everywhere, the state plays a critical role in the emergence of gray zones. Any ambivalence on the part of elected representatives or public authorities—whether wavering in the defense of substantive social rights or actively deregulating work—makes them complicit, if not, indeed their “joint creators” (Kesselman 2022; Bisom-Rapp and Coiquaud 2017). The role of the judiciary is crucial (Carelli and Kesselman 2019). In France, wishing to circumvent the classification of rideshare drivers and food delivery workers as employees by that country’s highest court, the Cour de Cassation, the Macron government simply ignored it, before leading the effort at EU level to rob the Platform Work Directive’s presumption of employment of its force. In Brazil, on the other hand, the Supremo Tribunal Federal has itself played a decisive role in undermining workers’ substantive gains through its radical reinterpretations of constitutionally guaranteed rights.

Subordination and Remuneration: Subjectivation in the Gray Zone

But what does the gray zone look like at the meso-social level—that is, when we focus less on legal frameworks or top-down dynamics and more on the institutions that structure social and power relations at work? Two factors stand at the heart of today’s transformations of work and are thus central to any discussion of the gray zone: the subordination central to the legal conception of waged employment, and remuneration. Patrick Cingolani and Antonella Corsani explore the hybrid character of subordination and remuneration respectively, showing how employers—and capitalism more broadly—constantly create gray zones around the institutional norms they supposedly adhere to, imposing practices that undermine them.

Hybrid forms have always been features of both subordination and remuneration, as the two authors show in accounts of their historical development. Whether in late-twentieth century Post-Fordism or in the ominous advent of a new digital order, capitalism is adept at conjuring hybrid figures in its quest for an amenable workforce. This is notably the case in matters of remuneration: the impersonal, objectively calculated and bureaucratically administered wage of Fordism, based on hours, skill, and/or grade, is being replaced by individualizing schemes of remuneration based on output and performance. This also modifies the expression of subordination, when the setting of targets leads employees to behave as if they were working for themselves (Supiot). In today’s digital economy, even as platforms vehemently deny the existence of any relationship of subordination, insisting that they are only mediating transactions between service-providers and clients, they impose forms of allegiance (sometimes pre-capitalist in nature, such as through bonuses, indebtedness, or even outright violence, as in China, for instance [Huang, 2024]) or a de facto subordination, mediated, for example, by field managers or “ambassadors” who recruit workers and ensure that tasks are carried out in conformity with platform requirements (Cingolani 2026). Are such hybrid configurations not in fact intrinsic to the platforms’ model of the task-based remuneration of supposedly self-employed independent contractors? Is the model itself not oxymoronic? Capitalism endlessly conjures up gray areas, here in the hybridization of work situations. Platforms argue that workers are self-employed, denying subordination while reinventing it in opaque, improvised forms. They even set independent contractors into competition with employed couriers.

Forms of remuneration and forms of subordination alike are “instruments of subjectivation”, as Corsani puts it, in that they enter into the constitution of the worker’s specific identity as a subject, even their sense of citizenship. In her chapter, Corsani explains how contemporary employee participation and profit-sharing schemes shape an identity that is distinct from that of other wage earners, fostering worker identification with management and with capitalist governance more generally, at the expense of solidarity with fellow employees. This shows clearly how questions of subordination and remuneration shape workers’ subjective, affective relationship to their employment and to the wider world. This economic aspect comes to determine rights, behavior and margins of maneuver, and, consequently workers’ degree of commitment to the job, the extent to which they may embrace or reject it. Gray zones here are created to attenuate the conflict between capital and labor and to remove the State—”society”, even—from the social contract, capitalist relations being blurred by the effects on subjectivity of the multiplication and diversity of hybrid combinations.

The concept of subjectivation—evoking both constitution as a “subject” and the subjection of subordination—is particularly relevant to the analysis of the gray zone. The yoking together of these two elements in new forms of organization and remuneration of work, promoting the multiplication of identities and the fracturing of commonalities while fostering the illusion of individual agency, is an instrument systematically deployed by capital to erode class solidarity. It creates an ambivalence, a gray zone in workers’ consciousness that is to a great degree responsible for the weakening of trade unionism.

Yet this gray zone of subjectivation is also conceived in very different terms by both Corsani and Cingolani. For it cannot all be put down to capitalist machinations: workers’ resistance or improvisation in the face of capital’s ever-renewed efforts at domination also have their role in undermining canonical institutions. Exit from employment, multiple job-holding, intermittent work, the exploitation of unemployment benefits, all kinds of micro-experiments in life and work intended to make both more livable, are all reactions to capital’s overweening power over work and simultaneously consequences and drivers of the gray zone. Worker agency itself proves to be a zone of ambivalence, not only accommodating to subordination but finding expression in innovative collective endeavors, such as platform cooperatives.

Time and Space in the Gray Zone

In her chapter, the geographer Corinne Siino looks at reconfigurations of the time and space of work that are increasingly out of sync with occupational categories, employment statuses and national statistics grounded in the traditional form of the firm with its own workplace and employees. She offers an illuminating overview of time at work: how it has been constructed and deconstructed over history, and how flexibility of time and space in the gray zone is taken advantage of by both employers and workers. Through outsourcing, the work of production is distributed among a multiplicity of locations and regulatory environments, so escaping institutional control (see Bellemare, Briand, and D’Amours in this volume). Workers, for their part, may optimize work-life balance by doing their work in places not specifically dedicated to work, at home, in co-working spaces, at the seaside or in the country, or even while travelling. Developments in public policy and the growth of telework and the individual life choices it makes possible have all tended to the deinstitutionalization of the place and time of work.

The Gray Zone and Class

The history of trade union struggle is that of workers’ continual effort to address the lack of norms constitutive of the “gray zone”, and every social advance represents a success in that fight.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the industrial sector primarily involved the manufacture of consumer goods. This required companies to establish a territorial implantation close to their raw materials and workforce. Social demands and struggles emerged against the background of such localized production, and eventually succeeded, sometimes at the cost of bloodshed, in winning social rights. A prime example might be France’s Workers and Farmers Pensions Act of 1910, which created the country’s first compulsory pension fund. Although that particular measure was challenged and ultimately repealed, this legislation represents the first step in the development of social law—the law of welfare and social justice—which was followed by a systematic expansion of social protection driven by the State and trade unions. It addressed a legal vacuum, resolving a gray zone, one of the salient normative conflicts of the time.

Demographic trends are a key factor in the emergence of gray zones in work and employment. The demographic revolution of the 20th century, which saw unprecedented growth in the urban population, notably associated with metropolization, led to the creation of a reserve army of workers willing to sacrifice the social gains of earlier generations in order to obtain employment. Developments in the labor force are thus a key factor in the creation of gray zones: when it grows by several billion over half a century, the formation of a reserve army of labor makes itself felt, especially when there are many candidates vying for a single post. Under these conditions, the less fortunate must find a way to make ends meet and therefore accept jobs less advantageous in terms of pay and social protection. It is in such a context of insecurity that contemporary capitalism has cultivated the idea of self-employment and entrepreneurship, fostering the illusion of escape from these conditions by altering the parameters of employment status and occupational category. Public statistics struggle to capture the phenomenon, as workers may hold one, two, or three jobs simultaneously under different employment statuses. Add to this the uneven global distribution of the labor force, concentrated chiefly in the Global South, the global distribution of the digital reserve army being an emblematic illustration of this.

The rise of the digital platform economy built on the 1960s expansion of the service economy. That had coincided with significant demographic growth: while the world population had reached two billion by the 1930s, it took only another thirty years to hit three billion. Against this demographic backdrop, there occurred significant internal and international migration, compelling States to develop new urban centers or satellite cities to accommodate the populations entering the metropolitan periphery. In the labor market, the expansion of the tertiary sector helped absorb a portion of the incoming agricultural and industrial workforce; new job categories—such as office work and various white collar occupations—emerged to meet the needs of service sector firms. The growing need for a well-educated workforce prompted the creation of numerous new universities. There was still, at that time, a strong connection between capital and territory: firms being strongly dependent on the resources and markets of their location, employers joined unions and the State in shaping social legislation. This period saw few gray zones in the tertiary sector: with the post-war boom, known as the “Thirty Glorious Years” in France, the demand for labor outstripped supply, unions were powerful and post-war employment law and the structures of company-based collective bargaining were robust. Workers could choose their jobs, opting for employers offering the most favorable working conditions. In those years, unemployment was virtually non-existent: everything had to be rebuilt in Europe, providing the basis for an unprecedented expansion of the US economy at home.

Bolstered by the emergence of the Internet, the world-wide market liberalization of the 1990s initiated the deterritorialization of business, notably through outsourcing to the Global South, a process exacerbated by the shift from traditional to digital services in the 2000s and 2010s. This represented a break with territorially-based development, undermining a system in which corporate funds had been a major source of infrastructure investment and renewal. The global firms of today’s digital platform economy are parasitic on such infrastructure, making use of it without contributing to its upkeep even though it forms an integral element of their value chains. How can packages be delivered without roads? How can urban bike lanes be funded without public revenue? How can there be delivery workers without the various literacies imparted by schools? 

The global population has continued to expand, rising from 5 billion in 1987 to 6.2 billion in 2000 and is projected to reach 8.3 billion in 2026. It is the generation born between the late 1990s and early 2000s that provides the digital platform economy with its “reserve army” of labor. With the world’s urban population passing the symbolic 50-percent mark in 2007, the gray zone in work and employment allows platforms to put these young workers living in dense urban areas into competition with each other. This highlights a key disconnect that no analysis of the gray zone can ignore: wealth and added-value are generated in urban centers, while the workforce of the digital service economy increasingly resides in the periphery, indeed in areas ever more remote from the location of work, creating problems of work-life balance for populations that have little access to transport, notably in the Global South.

Uberization can be understood as unmediated and immediate subjection to the task. Uberized workers have no “social property” in Castel’s sense, owning nothing but their own labor power. Stripped of any temporality of their own—possessed of no seniority, no experience (or recognized qualifications), supposedly afflicted by no physical or mental wear and tear, and having no future in the way of retirement to look forward to—they are reduced to task-executing value-production units. The promotion of unmediated subordination to the market through the commodification of all relations has a political purpose: the eradication of the very basis of workers’ emancipation through collective struggle. It clears the way for the platforms, ever insatiable, to impose their own will as “rule-makers”; and also for workers’ exercise of agency and ingenuity in response.

2. The Digital Gray Zone: Platform Practices, Tactics, Uses and Abuses

Uber’s mythic origin story sees Silicon Valley confront the failings of passenger transport across the globe. Frustrated by the difficulty of hailing a taxi in Paris, seemingly as bad as San Francisco, the company’s future CEO launched a service model that supposedly rests on its technological innovation and its efficacy, but is premised in fact on the undermining of public regulation, whether of labor or of urban transport. At the heart of Uber’s political and almost messianic crusade is the systematic dismantling of the norms of employment in order to create the uberized, on-demand driver. And what is more generally at stake is the creation of a world according to Silicon Valley, a society and a way of life informed by the new asymmetries of platform capitalism and its transformation of the labor market.

This deployment of digital technology has led to differences in access to information and in regulatory protection that are fracturing the wage-earning society, generating radical disparities. It has improved the standard of living of the middle and upper classes, whose professional skills are essential to capital, while fostering ever more treacherous combinations of precarity and informality for the workers who provide them with services. The uberized self-employment and the algorithmic management of on-demand labor pioneered with ride-hail drivers and food-delivery couriers has given rise to new, digitally mediated forms domestic work that erode the traditional boundaries between market and home. Micro-tasking handymen, cleaners, gardeners, valets, shoppers, dog walkers represent the “new jobs” of platform capitalism. On-call services proliferate thanks to the algorithm’s ability to rapidly match a supply to a demand, so unravelling the fabric of daily life in the city. Its inhabitants are systematically alienated from each other in ever new forms of ad hoc service rendered abstract and remote by the technology and the endless replaceability of a workforce consigned to the delivery of candy bars and bubble tea.

Platforms come to permeate social relationships and interactions. They generate new needs shaped by the individualization and the technologically mediated immediacy that they offer, in the workplace, in the home, in the city. Many of the activities that gave texture to everyday life are consigned to an abstract elsewhere,^[4] while those now performing these tasks form an increasingly flexible, mobile, and depersonalized workforce, whose work offers nothing in the way of social connection or meaning. Everything becomes marketable, and the market becomes anonymous, for both buyer and seller. Workers are stripped of their distinct individuality while consumers are reduced to it. The interaction that nourished a sense of the civic has gone, while the time once specifically set aside for self-maintenance and sociability has crumbled under the demand for speed and the pressure for instant availability. The central question is whether platformization marks a historical rupture. We earlier sought to initiate debate on the gray zone as the terrain on which the post-Fordist future was being worked out (Carelli, Cingolani, and Kesselman 2022). Does the uberizing of the economy represent the old capitalism taking on a new guise, the emergence of a “post-welfare state capitalism”? Does it displace the capitalist mode of production, inaugurating a “post-capitalism”, a new socio-economic order (Varoufakis 2024)? Or is it in some sense a headlong dash towards the singular world fantasized by the Silicon Valley futurists? The gray zone approach helps grasp the systemic transformations in course and the new identities emerging as a result, so usefully contributing to the discussion.

The Uberized “App-Based Driver Status” in the Gray Zone

The advent of the app-based driver who is neither an employee nor properly an independent contractor, but subordinated to the algorithm, certainly marks a break with the employment paradigm of the welfare state. In their chapter, Rodrigo Carelli and Donna Kesselman analyze the phenomenon in terms of what they call the “Uber app-based driver template”. In promoting the Proposition 22 ballot initiative in 2020 and overturning California legislation that classified its drivers as employees, Uber imposed itself as a “quasi-legislator” (Kesselman 2025). Comparison of developments in the United States, France and Brazil shows the creation and exploitation of gray zones to be the strategic means adopted by platforms to contrive the institutionalization elsewhere of that prototype uberized employment status. This shows to what extent the “disruption” that is consubstantial with uberization (Dubal, Collier, and Carter 2018) is not an end in itself but is intended to lay the groundwork for the sometimes piecemeal introduction of “Uber norms” of both regulation and status, the component elements of Uber’s model of the platform worker and stepping stones towards a digital-ecosystem-based regulation. Implemented in ad hoc, government-initiated forms in France and Brazil, sectoral collective bargaining for independent couriers and drivers has become a new Uber norm, introduced to the United States by a Massachusetts ballot initiative in 2024. The chapter highlights the common features in these parallel efforts to institutionalize an uberized employment status and also the resistance that these have met.

Gray zone research helps us go beyond simplistic, binary takes on the relations between Global North and South, as if capitalism had some white, “Western”, industrialized and high added-value—in a word, civilized—homeland, surrounded by a benighted rest of the world. Ludmila Abílio addresses uberization as an umbrella concept that gains in power and complexity when deployed at and from the periphery, that is, from the Global South. Her chapter thus seeks to define the main elements of the uberization of work, understood as a new form of organization, management, and control that is not limited to digital platforms and did not begin with them. These are work on demand,building on a long-existing process of the informalization of work, and what she calls subordinated self-management (Abílio 2023). Finally, she draws attention to the lived experiences of workers in the periphery, arguing that these apparently new elements are in fact an updating and further generalisation of features that have long structured peripheral ways of life: the uberized gray zone of self-management within informality normalizes and institutionalizes “trying to get by” as a way of life (the Brazilian viração, the French débrouillardise).

The Gray Zone of the Uberized City

Whether intervening in legislative processes or governmental decision-making (Lehdonvirta 2020), or seeking to undermine legal doctrine, the platforms are determined to encroach on every sphere. The unilateral implementation of their all-encompassing blueprint entails a permanent quest to escape the constraints of planning law and digital and other regulation through the exploitation of defect, lacuna or inertia. Platforms act as rootless, extraterritorial entities within the global landscape, their behavior characterized by the deliberate disregard of established norms with a view to their remaking, pseudo–negotiation, or a “contentious compliance” that aims at their final erosion (Valdez 2022). Their power and seeming untouchability rests on technological oligopoly and the vast resources they command, now rivalling states in this respect. Google can command the laying of transatlantic fiber-optic cables to meet the explosion in internet usage or help elements of the state evade democratic control of government surveillance of communications—as seen in the Total Information Awareness program (Zuboff 2019, 163–4). The gray zones promoted by this extraterritoriality have far-reaching effects on cities, among them the externalities of location-based operations in terms of traffic congestion, side-walk obstruction, pollution and general free-riding on urban infrastructure. This is the gray zone of the privatized public domain.

In his chapter, Maxime Schirrer investigates the gray zone of conflicting uses of urban space arising from the implantation of dark kitchens and dark stores in the city. The platform economy is seen here as a disaggregating force, unravelling the commercial and social fabrics that structure city life. The gray zone approach offers unique insights into the dynamics that arise when the new arrivals cross swords with residents and other established urban interests.

A gray zone in itself in its blurring of boundaries and categorial distinctions, it is digital platforms’ voracious use of urban public space that fuels disputes with inhabitants and city authorities, so raising it as a political issue. Dark kitchen and dark store platforms’ parasitic use of urban space and the ideological rhetoric they deploy in defending the disruption they represent are designed to free them of the social obligations of the past. In this they conflict with the conceptions of public space of both public authorities and the residents who claim their own “right to the city”. This is “a struggle over place”, as Michel Lussault would have it (2011), a struggle over the ownership of the city, and it is this Lefebvrian idea of urban democracy (Lefebvre 1968), among others, that underpins Schirrer’s analysis here. The gray zone approach enriches the spatial categories deployed by geographers in accounting for the conditions of life and work of both the clients of digital services and the precarious workers who serve them—in one way or another, the entire body politic is concerned.

3. Emergent Figures in the Gray Zone

From the neoliberal unraveling of yesterday’s status quo to the digital-technological upheaval of today, workers are themselves centrally involved, as agents of change, in the historical process that sees capitalism transformed and work and employment reconfigured. The notion of agency within domination acknowledges the significance of workers’ defiance of digitalization’s asymmetries of power. These workers are the “emergent figures” who inhabit the gray zone; they embody the constantly renewed processes of the reconfiguration of forms of work (see Christian Azaïs’s chapter here).

While the all-encompassing process of platformization driven by finance capital has had deleterious effects on established forms of employment, it has at the same time prompted the development of alternative practices by workers. Some groups take advantage of platform work so as to cope with their particular social circumstances. Those who find themselves in almost inescapable poverty, with no hope of social protection or advancement, may well accept the precarious and inferior working conditions; they still gain an income and even limited social recognition. Though they might well serve the platforms as a “reserve army”, given endemic unemployment, we still need to account for workers’ own relationships to the platforms in sociological terms. One of the most striking examples is that of workers who are victims of discrimination or racialization. They have found in the abstraction and neutrality of the algorithm a means to escape the discrimination associated with lower-caste status in India, the legacy of historical slavery in Latin America, or the post-colonial stigmatization of young people from multi-generational immigrant backgrounds in Europe. Christian Azaïs’s chapter explores this phenomenon as instanced by Brazil’s motoboys (motorcycle couriers). They use platform work so as to be able to organize their working time around their obligations as parents, for instance, while it may also allow them to earn more money than they could in the types of work otherwise open to them, if at the cost of long and exhausting hours. What is more, the demands of the algorithm can be seen less humiliating than subjection to a petty boss, and its evaluations more objective. In Europe, the hard work of some in these groups has paid off, allowing them to move in from the margins, shedding their pariah status through upward economic mobility. Platform work can also prompt the manifestation of workers’ collective agency, e.g. in organizing through independent collectives in India and elsewhere in the Global South, as it gives a clear identity to the taskmaster, otherwise obscured by the multiplicity of intermediaries characteristic of informality (Chintala 2023).

Other groups have managed to carve out a specific niche for themselves working for delivery platforms. They often comprise middle-class youth, such as the cycle-couriers emergent from big-city cycling subcultures, many of them students, who use the platforms to provide them with regular part-time work or an opportunity to gain occasional additional income. They have found ways to make the system work for them, though platforms are undermining their strategies by increasingly tapping into undocumented immigrant populations. Such workers have been capable of organizing in resistance to platform demands, while often keeping their distance from traditional trade unionism. This has notably seen struggles waged against the modification of payment structures, from hourly rates to per-job payment. Over the last decade, food-delivery workers in France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom have fought against this return to piecework-style subjugation. More recently in Brazil, movements driven by a similar spirit of activism have secured pay raises and improvements in working conditions and social protection. In 2020—and again in 2025—iFood, Brazil’s largest food delivery platform, was compelled to concede some of these demands. In Europe, such actions have helped fuel the rise of alternative organizations running worker-owned platforms (e.g., Coopcycle in France, the Drivers Cooperative in the United States^[5]). These new stakeholders are emergent figures in the gray zone, engaged in precarious work that nonetheless serves as a buffer against worse forms of precarity, discrimination and marginality. While the platforms’ algorithm-driven dictates and the inherent instability of the workforce do not lend themselves to the establishment of lasting forms of organization, new mentalities have emerged. The ideology of the self-employed entrepreneur can also instill workers with a newfound confidence in their own agency. Many have become “their own boss” by creating cooperatively owned platforms that give them real power over their own work, this adaptation of the digital platform model thus seeing the emergence of a new figure, the “cooperative platform worker”.

We have already observed that platformization involves more than just the erosion of employment as a norm. Through digitization, platforms are commodifying ever more activities previously located outside the market. The burgeoning of gig work and of streaming and blogging in expectation of income is reminiscent of the host of trivial, itinerant trades that existed in the nineteenth century. Amid the myriad services on offer are on-demand valet parking anywhere in the metropolitan areas covered, and professional standers-in-line on behalf of those who have better things to do than wait—all working as self-employed. Micro-commodification captures and siphons off energy from an economy that is not merely informal but vernacular—rooted in the local and the communal and based on reciprocity. Platforms extend the scope of commodification and the resulting abstraction of social relations into spaces that had been constituted as inter-personal or informal commons, as exemplified by the fabric of mutual aid sustained by and sustaining of working-class or immigrant communities.^[6]

Platform work has been used by some to escape other precarious forms of employment—themselves products of the post-Fordist fragmentation of work—characterized by repetitivity, lack of prospects or any scope for initiative, or conditions sometimes bordering on domestic servitude. Beyond an income, they find in it something to invest themselves in. Many see in platform work a system that offers a degree of autonomy, if only the ability to choose when and how much they work. Platforms, though, have taken advantage of such aspirations to freedom through flexibility, enhanced by the illusion of easy money, to institute an “economy of unkept promises”, in which workers only appear to be in control of their own work and lives. The local, “pocket money” economy of algorithm-mediated gigs or ad hoc transactions is, however, more often than not a trap for those who hope to escape subordination through juggling odd jobs and family life. Still, every day, often for lack of better options, a digital workforce is formed anew. Its members are often young, and/or in a situation of social fragility, and they turn to platform work as a means of getting by, of débrouillardise or viração; this new figure in quest of a precarious work-life balance is the emblematic inhabitant of the uberized world.

The chapter by Brazilian researchers Isabel Georges and Yumi Garcia dos Santos sheds light on a specific and fundamental aspect of this situation in focusing on women’s work—particularly the work of social reproduction that customarily falls to them. Uberization is taking over the activities that sustain human life and turning them into commodities, and by introducing standardization and productivity and profitability targets into the realm of care generally, platforms are extending alienation to the very heart of the making of the human. Georges and Santos explore the ambiguities involved in the commodification of care, only made possible by the non-commercial impulses of the workers involved. The idea of the gray zone allows them to move beyond the traditional analytical dichotomies to understand the ways in which traditional and emergent forms of work and life are intertwined, as revealed by in-depth, comparative analysis of two empirical case studies, on the work of community health workers in Brazil and Filipino care workers in Québec. These show a continuity in the content of women’s work, despite the discontinuities of form brought about by broader labor market changes, including the erosion of standard employment and the rise of the digital economy.

The use workers make of platforms falls into a number of patterns, different ways of combining compliance and resistance. Workers are compliant in accepting neoliberal market mechanisms, driven by the “popular pragmatism” described by Gago (2017), in which the everyday reality of unemployment, short-term jobs and modest incomes prompts them to turn to platforms as a means to getting by. This kind of attitude can foster an inventiveness that may enhance platforms’ own potential. For instance, in the case of Vinted—a commission-free platform for the sale of second-hand clothing and accessories—young French micro-entrepreneurs (students or others) put the site to business use by buying items with a view to selling them at a profit. Similarly, ride-hail drivers and delivery workers deceive the algorithm by obscuring their location within the city or, in defiance of the platforms’ own rules, using multiple platforms and playing them off against each other. Uses are adversarial when workers have their own ambitions with regard to this new economy, sparking struggles over working conditions and pay. One thus sees the patterns below:

• Self-investment: Here, worker agency contributes to the proliferation of the micro-entrepreneur paradigm that devalues employment as an aspiration and whose ambiguities allow the algorithm to encroach on all areas of life. This agency under domination ends up ruthlessly taken advantage of by platforms. It locks individuals into precarity through an “economy of unkept promises” that continuously generates new forms of stigmatization and subjugation.
• Appropriation: While collaborating with platforms, agency under domination can also seek to subvert and reinvent them. It creates a gray zone between platforms and their users—any and all the actors who put them to specific uses—constituted by the disparity between the platform’s norms and the way the user actually uses the service. Examples include the ways ride-hail drivers deceive the platforms, or people put a peer-to-peer resale network to commercial use.
• Contestation: This is the agency of resistance. While operating within the framework of domination, it imposes negotiation and reconfiguration. The gray zone of struggle is marked by both advances and setbacks. Struggles against platform abuses in sectors such as ride-hailing and food delivery have seen the formation of activist organizations and support groups. More broadly, they have raised worker awareness, sparked new ambitions, and led to the creation of vehicles of collective action such as the Transnational Federation of Couriers. Independent worker associations contribute to the revitalization of the labor movement through the collective organization of independent contractors or by pioneering new forms of collective bargaining. What is more, workers are finding alternative uses for the platform model. Platform cooperatives, for example, combine the digital platform with workers democratic association so as to preserve the historic gains represented by employment. All seek to occupy the gray zone between self-employment and subordination.

Concluding Remarks

We have seen the platform to be a multifaceted, hybrid phenomenon, tentacular in its reach. Platforms are not confined to any specific sector; free of the obligations and constraints of the traditional workplace and employment, the model of digitally mediated self-employment opens up new domains of exchange. Minimal costs of intermediation and the algorithm’s ability to micro-match supply and demand make it possible to operate in low-profit niches. While a company that employed staff to do the work would find organizing a dog-walking service unprofitable, platforms can easily connect self-employed walkers with interested dog owners and take a percentage of the fee. The facility with which this is done both creates work opportunities and opens up to commerce domains of everyday activity hitherto uncommercialized. Commodification has transformed the exchange of favors into a realm of precarity, marginality, under-employment, and insecurity in retirement, as opposed to a sector of the formal economy. This gray zone, in which platformization turns informality or social solidarity into the ultra-precarity of the gig economy is one aspect of how platforms change the place of the market in society, and so change society. Comparable dynamics are operative at all levels of the global economy.

A key theoretical contribution to the understanding of the gray zone, the concept of the “productive configuration” outlined by Quebecois researchers Guy Bellemare, Louise Briand and Martine D’Amours in their chapter traces the shift from production at one identifiable workplace to the product as the final output of a whole network of entities, sometimes globally scattered. Its corollary is “the social labor relation”, which sees working conditions as governed not by the single, notional employer but by the interaction of the component parts of the configuration: the relevant concept now not being (legal) subordination to the employer but the de facto control resulting from the coordination of these actors. On-demand work, as opposed to the rigidities of employment, allows them to respond to the fluctuations of market and network, at the same time freeing capital from its earlier obligations. These authors’ concept of “diversified regulation” accordingly accounts for the impact on the world of work of rules that have no place in contracts of employment, such as those imposing conditions of government funding on third-sector employers. This suite of concepts captures how capitalism—through outsourcing and, more recently, digitalization—has dispersed operations and eroded the norms governing work while at the same time maintaining or even reinforcing its control over workers. In such a context, the gray zone approach provides a basis for mapping social systems whose boundaries, actors, relationships, and rules can no longer be defined in formal terms.

What these processes share, both micro-level down-sourcing and global out-sourcing, is their intent. To reduce costs by shedding the responsibilities imposed on capital by the employment-centered system for the allocation of rights and the social redistribution of wealth that underpinned the twentieth-century labor market and the social fabric it sustained. To demolish the workplace power on the basis of which the working class could aspire to improve its lot or conceive of its collective emancipation.

The productive configuration is a valuable tool for conceptualizing the “dematerialization” of the firm. It remains, however, fundamentally coupled to an organizational model—even in network form—whose mechanisms of control over labor, as complex as they might be, are still geared to the “rational” production of goods and services by capital. Platforms, on the contrary, host realms that are free of such governance. They operate by exercising control over the transactions of others, profiting from the provision of a service while externalizing the costs and responsibilities normally entailed.

The degree of polarization identified in this volume raises the prospect of social fracture. The highly skilled middle and upper classes surf the tide of financial speculation. While their own work-life balance is at constant risk, it is directly and parasitically reliant on ultra-precarious, task-based workers. While not subject to any formal subordination or hierarchy, the performance of work is stringently monitored by the platforms; they profit not only from the vitality and physical exertions of their workers, but from their stress and suffering. The platforms’ contagious spread stems from their ingenuity in harnessing people’s vital energies through neoliberal violence. While digital capital also dominates workers in employment, as in Amazon fulfilment centers, its characteristic form of domination is through self-employment, the means to the hyper-externalization of all operating costs to workers and local authorities.

In its colonization of work and society, even extending to workers’ private lives (Cingolani 2021), digital commodification has redrawn the institutional and social landscape for all classes. Modes of consumption that displace existing practices, such as app-based meal delivery, are not restricted to the business and financial centers of the metropolis. Rising unemployment and falling incomes in developing countries have encouraged low-income families to use delivery services rather than eating out, restaurants having become too expensive.

Platformization offers, in a sense, a way out of the State/private-enterprise dichotomy. The prospect is raised by platform capitalism’s insidious maneuvers aimed at capitalizing on the failings of the welfare state. Uber’s initial agreement with the Bay Area city of Dublin, California, under which the public authorities subsidized individual passenger service for isolated populations or on routes where public provision would be too costly, has been emulated worldwide, in the French cities of Lille and Nice, for example. Low-priced platform intermediation is poised to bypass the public system altogether. One can hardly imagine the states in retreat of today having the means to counter the uberization and massification of passenger transport that has doubtless reached the point of no return in cities of the Global South. Broad layers of the population—women, children and the otherwise vulnerable—have access to taxi service for the first time and find themselves able again to travel the streets of São Paulo and Rio at night. Whether in food delivery or passenger transport, workers are mobilized to serve other workers too, the class as a whole becoming involved in the platforms’ hyper-exploitation of a growing proportion of its members.

There are some exceptions to this seemingly inexorable process, with its potentially harmful consequences for the idea of the state as the embodiment of universal welfare and guardian of the commons. The healthcare sector, and hospitals in particular, are increasingly calling on temporary employment agencies. In France, the idea of connecting healthcare institutions with self-employed medical staff through platforms remains marginal and has yet to gain significant traction. This is largely due to opposition from lawmakers, though such platform-based structures have not been explicitly banned. The uberization of the health sector has gone much further, however, in less highly regulated countries such as Brazil, extending precarity to a highly-skilled sector of the workforce.

The contradictory, conflict-ridden dynamics set in motion by the platforms find expression in gray zones where expectations are constantly under negotiation by stakeholders old and new. There, too, emerge the potential alternatives to platforms’ vampirization of the commons monopolized by the state. Worker agency has to be central to any attempt to countering capitalist, consumption-based individualism. The emergent institution of the cooperative platform offers a new mode of relation to the commons via self-managed systems of intermediation linked to local communities. Modest experiments along these lines were seen during the pandemic, when cooperative platforms—France’s Coopcycle being one example—operated food deliveries for impoverished and isolated residents in certain neighborhoods. Cooperatives have also devised elaborate, hybrid employment statuses that allow ride-hail drivers to enjoy the social protections afforded by employment rights while preserving flexibility of working hours.

Thus, the power relations between capital and labor, the role of the market in relation to work, family, community and society as a whole, the role of the State as embodiment of the democratic will are all increasingly clouded, all the more so with the disruptive advent of the digital platforms. This wider social space portrays labor market transformations and reconfigurations in their movement; they are structured and stable, reflected in emergent figures of the worker whose staying power cannot be determined in advance.

The international comparison of gray zones in work and employment reveals the current transformation of work in all its complexity, throwing light on the global circulation of the elements involved in the constantly shifting (re)configurations of work. In bringing out their similarities and differences, it puts national cases into wider perspective and clarifies their shared dynamics. In their chapter here, Olivier Giraud and Frederic Rey consider the value of the concept of the gray zone as a means to escape the constraints of the customary binary and static frames of reference, and reflect on the difficulties and rewards of comparison between systems in the throes of change. It is this marriage of methodological reflection and conceptual innovation that allows the concept of the gray zone to come to full fruition in the constitution of a transdisciplinary object. It enables us, then, to rethink work in a way worthy of its complexity and its multiple entanglements with the rest of life. In setting the phenomena of work in their social, historical and categorial contexts it shows us the plasticity of work under capitalism. This book, then, aims to equip readers and workers with the tools to better understand—and so more effectively struggle in, and against—the gray zone. Its reflections are all, equally, calls to action.

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