Institutional change and transformations in labour and employment standards

Abstract

Initially employed by lawyers and geopolitical experts, the concept of ‘grey zones’ can be usefully applied to analyse the recent changes on the labour market. It provides a means of bypassing the dualist approaches that contrast waged work and self-employment, insiders and outsiders, or, then again, formal and informal work in a binary way. It provides visibility of the decoherence between the institutions associated with waged status and actual employment practices, and the layering of several different kinds of regulation. The ‘grey zones’ approach thus provides an analytical framework for understanding a wide variety of situations and studying various processes of institutional change, giving the actors of this change their rightful place. Although grey zones are often areas where laws are absent or weak, through these actors they can also give rise to new institutions.