About the theme

How should we understand the ways that digital work, always increasingly elusive, transforms and recomposes employment norms? How can these phenomena be compared across distinct national contexts?

While the binaries of the welfare state–employment and unemployment, for instance–have been undermined, they still inform the ideology and jurisdiction of existing labor institutions and criteria regulating access to social protection. In the absence of a theoretical consensus on the who or what the paradigmatic post-Fordist “worker” is, attempts at adapting either worker organization or state welfare often run aground in part because of this theoretical and strategic ambiguity (Valdez, 2023, Riesgo, 2023). These older norms still remain cognitive reference points in diverse locales, despite their geo-historical grounding in advanced Global North countries. This limitation is an obstacle to understanding emerging developments in work occurring in other national contexts and to developing a dynamic and comprehensive epistemology that would enhance our understanding of the recompositions underway.

The blurring of legal distinctions between the canonic figures of Fordism–subordinated employee or independent worker (Supiot, 2000)–has given way to countless dynamics of grey zones from the core of the standard employment relationship to its outer borders. (Bureau, Corsani, Giraud, Rey 2019). These changes assume new significance with the advent of digital platforms that disrupt the responsibilities, hierarchies and rationales of subordination and power in the context of work (Carelli, Cingolani, Kesselman, 2022). Such blurring also exists in the Global South, where the social state emerged belatedly and brought with it genuine but fragile rights. We must also consider the impact of digital work on the situation of generalized informality in Global South countries where, depending on the period, the state and municipalities navigate between repressing and facilitating informal activities, while entertaining ambiguous relations with the platforms.

Comparisons between the Global North and South will help us better assess what is common to employment standards globally, their regulations and underlining relationships, and–in a more comprehensive frame–the citizenship norms that they are tightly braided with. (For instance, citizenship is linked to the carteira de trabalho in the Brazilian case, even though informality affects half the workers in this country and therefore excludes them.) Rights have been progressively curtailed through labor market reforms (such as in France, 2016 and 2017 or in Brazil, 2017), which has contributed to a spawning of self-employed independent workers who became a captive workforce of platforms promoting themselves as “job creators”. In the case of the South, we have witnessed a naturalization and a recomposition of informality under the disguise of self-entrepreneurship—“be your own boss” Comparisons between the Global North and South will help us better assess what is common to employment standards globally, their regulations and underlining relationships, and the citizenship norms that they are tightly braided with. —and flexible work (Lim a, Bridi, 2019; Lima, Oliveira, 2022).

Grey zones also emerge from sources other than the deterioration of the standard employment relationship’s institutional frameworks, with different dimensions in the North and South. The epistemology of the platforms’ economic models takes as its point of departure the decentralized organization of work between distinct clienteles in the two-sided market. Algorithmic and triangular management practices–platform-client-providerinvolve a series of centrifugal forces within ecosystems that organize the disarticulation of work from employment and its social protections. This is how they succeed in bypassing public regulation in the North and the particular forms of work regulation in the South, where informal work is managed in urban spaces (Dieuaide, 2024; Dieuaide, Azaïs, 2020; Minassian, 2011; Kiesling, 2018). In their own fashion, digital platforms thereby “modernize” work relations and bring about their recomposition.

By setting up public management departments digital platforms have positioned themselves as “rule makers” in attempts to impose a “third figure of digital app worker” within every specific local context (Azaïs, Dieuaide, Kesselman, 2017). Such strategies muddy the waters and contribute to fuelling grey zones of work and of employment.

What horizon for emancipation?

Might one say that all these realities can be subsumed under the advent of “platform capitalism” (Leite, del Bono, Lima, 2023; Srnicek, 2016; Abdelnour, Bernard, 2018) or of the “gig economy” (Huws, Spencer, Syrdal, Holts , 2017; Vallas, Schor, 2020)? In any case, this ecompositions pose a challenge for any attempt at comprehensive regulation of work. The core issue always arises: is there a break or continuity between the standard employment relationship and the welfare state (Carelli, Dieuaide, Kesselman 2022)? Or, alternatively, is this a new mode of production altogether? Is there a “meta-category,” like “digital labor” or “platform workers,” or are there salient characteristics that distinguish these new kinds of laborers from each other? (Brodersen, Dufresne, Joukovsky, Vitali 2024; Casilli, 2019). Are the changes in platform work and its “ambivalent” nature in the North really comparable to these emerging regimes of labor in the South? (Rizek, Rangel, 2023; Machado, Zanoni 2022; Fioravanti, Rangel, Rizek, 2022; Abílio, 2020; Flichy, 2019)? Or is the digital “fourth industrial revolution” nothing more than just another new western-centred paradigm (Leterme, 2019)? What about the driving role of finance and of successive crises (Sauviat, 2019)? Is the proliferation of digital work by multinational platforms sufficient to lay the bases for a truly globalized world labor market? If not, what would be the necessary conditions to do so? Is emancipation through work and employment still a horizon that mobilizes digital workers in the Global North and in the Global South and between them?

Today, most app drivers and food couriers are racialized workers, from the descendants of slaves in Brazil and the United States to the postcolonial immigrants in France. This now established statistical reality (Dablanc, Aguilera, Krier, Cognez, Chretien, Louvet, 2022; Santos, Carelli, 2022), interfaces with racialized representations of platform work associated with precarious, low-wage jobs (Van Doorn, Ferrari, Graham, 2023, Dubal, 2022). To what degree are these regimes of racialization driven by what some have called platform capitalism (Marchadour, 2024, Gebrial, 2022; Bernard, 2023)? This opens a discussion from the perspective of the margins concerning the very nature of platforms in capitalism. Santos’s approach (2022: 16) in terms of “tough areas” and “soft areas” which “structure the ‘invisible borders’ in the social space of social relations that impose constraints on undesired individuals or groups in particular places and contexts” echoes the notion of the grey zone.

What analytical tools to use?

We are interested in tools that can consider transformations and reconfigurations of work and of employment, in the wake of the development of digital platforms, and we propose to compare experiences rooted in the Global North and South. What are the interactions and limitations when transposing preconceived and Eurocentric notions such as the salaried workforce (le salariat) and legal subordination, the formal-informal duality (Archambault, Greffe, 1984), entrepreneurship, citizenship, the nation, etc.? What are the terms of “decentering comparative analysis”, those capable of analyzing similarities and differences within a global frame (Giraud, Lallement, 2022)? Are there developments that circulate to the heartlands of global capitalism from the South, whose less restrictive regulatory environments the platforms use as a laboratory for their technological and economic models, an example being accelerating informality? (Huws, Surie, 2023)? Their adaptability to local constraints is at the heart of these new business models: in the South, what are the conceptual tools that are needed to effectively interpret the “contextual otherness and endogenous causalities” that are specific to these national and cultural contexts (Soussi, Sadik, 2020)? Thus, the importance of epistemologies of the Souths. In short, how should one account for the tensions between micro and macro and, more generally, the definition of scales of analysis? How do the categories employed—both by actors and researchers—fit into and make sense of these scales?

To renew paradigms for the investigate of platform work, there must also be reflection upon the geographical and symbolic meaning of physical and virtual territories. This is especially true for location-based platforms. Our proposal to compare situated micro-cases is aimed at avoiding the risk of essentializing a macro scale that posits the existence of a “Center” in balance with a “Periphery”, that is contrasted with a micro scale that confines the agency of actors to a local and immediate space, not accounting for more complex and historical social relations. (De Vito, 2019). While the cases are situated in diverse forms of territories and contexts, our privileged terrain of analysis for studying passenger app drivers and couriers–meals and food shopping–is the metropolis, which we believe should be studied from a “trans-urban approach” (Cuppini, Frapporti,2022). Thus, the urban space should be conceived of as a field of tensions where platforms directly invest in public affairs, announcing their role as actors of innovation and public planning.

We are seeking to identify the connections and circulations of objects, norms, regulations, and practices of platform work which are, indeed, comparable and can be conceived of as part of a global totality (Douki, Minard, 2007). How can we compare the indigenous categories used by the actors to portray such notions as work, occupational status, remuneration, protections, benefits and rights, and the way workers appropriate their local communities and territories? How do the new synchronizations of time, work-life balance and workers’ embeddedness in territories interweave with the blurring of workers’ private lives due to the “colonization of daily life” by platforms (Cingolani, 2021)? What are the consequences of struggle waged by workers–either individually or collectively–to resist or adhere to these new models of work (Brugière, Kesselman, Vandewattyne, 2024; Dufresne, Leterne, 2021)?

What is the impact of recent legal rulings concerning reclassification of bogus employment? And what is the nature of the prominent role taken by the courts in the absence of robust regulation of digital platform work? On a more general level, one observes the destabilization, displacement and instrumentalization of institutions by platforms. The ultimate ambition of this cross-cutting analysis is the development of concepts and categories that can effectively speak to and facilitate the comparison of diverse instances of platform work and its insertion into a broader reflection concerning “the future of work.” (Dujarier, Frayssé, 2024; Herzog, Zimmermann, 2023).

An analysis of grey zones

We draw upon the heuristic tool of “grey zones of work and of employment”. Grey zones are spaces where the dynamics of disembeddedness and recomposition of work and employment become the critical object of study. They are more or less defined and instituted as their content, extent and duration are in constant motion. As As these grey zones are defined in a constantly changing national environments, comparing how they they subsumes term-to-term juxtapositions and provides a more thorough understanding of the processes underway, tracking the complex interaction of different elements (Kesselman, Soussi 2024, Bureau, Dieuaide, 2018; Bureau, Corsani, Giraud, Rey 2019; Boulin, Kesselman, 2018, Azaïs, Carleial, 2017; Siino, Soussi, 2017).

We rely on research that highlights the dynamics of grey zones in digital work. In all countries, grey zones constitute the heuristic tool that enables us to understand the “institutional instability”’ that is generated by neoliberalism and aggravated by the advent of platforms. This process considers the resistance of institutions, notably that of the judiciary, but which is often undermined by difficulties in setting precedent on which other judgements could rely (Carelli et al., 2021; Grillo, 2022/2024). Some governments participate actively in the construction of grey zones (Lehdonvirta, 2022; Bisom-Rapp, Coiquaud, 2017) via measures of self-regulation by the platforms or through the establishment of broad-based forums of social dialogue and of collective regulation which recognize new stake-holders as regulators, such as recently in France and in Brazil (Carelli, Kesselman, 2024). The same goes for the displacement of “orders and spaces of regulation” (Dirringer, 2022): platforms attempt to instrumentalize such transfers to their own advantage, notably at the time of their positioning as “rule makers” in the public space of regulation (Azaïs, Dieuaide, Kesselman, 2017). Platforms have been increasingly able to dictate public policy, thereby interfering with what was the jurisdiction of public powers. We perceive grey zones closest to the experience of work by focusing on its “hybridity” (Murgia, 2023) and “emerging figures in the grey zone” (Azaïs, 2019). The figures navigate within a “social work relationship” (RST), the enlarged space of relations of control, from which recompositions can be instituted in network firms, value chains or algorithmic management outside of any institutional frameworks (D’Amours, 2022; D’Amours, Briand, Bellemare, Hanin, Pogliaghi, 2023) Thus the grey zone is an approach that can help us parse the actual degree of “disruption” brought about by the new labor platform economy (Berins Collier, Dubal, Carter, 2018), separating the substantive changes from the ideological or catastrophist noises coming from all directions.

Ultimately, the questioning which structures of this conference could be summed up by the following formula: Is there a need for a specific epistemology to the study of digital work?