The growth of non-standard employment relations has created one of the major challenges in terms of workers' rights as well as collective representation in European societies. Among non-standard employment relations, so-called "solo self-employed"-self-employed workers without employees-are challenging the very foundations of our labor markets, that is to say the opposition between employers and employees, fostering the development of emerging "hybrid" areas of work. The heterogeneity of the solo self-employed is difficult to capture from official statistics, which are still based on traditional classifications, and questions also the legal categories that qualify these workers. Moreover, the fact that solo self-employed workers do not form a homogenous group, and are diverse in terms of their activities, interests and needs, calls for changes in the way trade unions, employer organizations, and new freelancer associations develop collective actions, claims-making activities, and strategies of organizing. With the aim to achieve an in-depth understanding of the increasingly extensive and populated categories of the solo self-employed, this contribution aims at reconstructing the state of the art within different fields of study, such as employment relations, labor law, industrial relations and social movements, and at offering some possible future research directions.

A lot of things need to be repaired and a lot of relationships are in need of a knowledgeable mending. Can we start to talk/write about them?' This invitationsent by one of the authors to the othersled us, as feminist women in academia, to join together in an experimental writing about the effects of COVID-19 on daily social practices and on potential (and innovative) ways for repairing work in different fields of social organization. By diffractively intertwining our embodied experiences of becoming together-with Others, we foreground a multiplicity of repair (care) practices COVID-19 is making visible. Echoing one another, we take a stand and say that we need to prevent the future from becoming the past. We are not going back to the past; our society has already changed and there is a need to cope with innovation and repairing practices that do not reproduce the past.

This article, based on a 6-month cross-national ethnography conducted in France and Italy, aims at contributing to comparative debates on the representation of platform workers. The study takes the cases of both traditional and alternative actors that currently represent platform workers. In particular, by investigating both trade unions and grassroots groups, research findings show the gap between discursive and effective representation in the two European countries studied. Drawing on Hyman and Gumbrell-McCormick’s concept of ‘variable geometry of resistance’, we discuss how these gaps are wider or narrower depending on to what extent – in the two countries and in the studied organizations – there is capacity to build both solidarity in difference and alliances between traditional and alternative actors.

To date, the emergence of representation of hitherto under-represented workers has mainly been analysed in terms of strategic choices of traditional industrial relations actors. This study – focused on solo self-employed workers (SSE) – instead analyses the interactions between unions, employer organisations and new collective actors, namely SSE associations. More specifically, drawing on a comparative ethnography conducted in three European countries, it conceptualises the representation of SSE as a ‘subfield’ of the ‘parent field’ of employee and employer representation and shows how interactions between traditional and new collective actors consolidate the subfield of SSE representation by also shaping the industrial relations’ institutions. This article thus contributes, first, to the debate about the representation of under-represented workers by emphasising the importance of interactions between traditional and new actors in industrial relations, and second, to the theory of fields by conceptualising interactions as a central element of field-level change.

This article contributes to the debate on the enterprise culture, which is characterised by the celebration of risk-taking and self-realisation, which in turn also implies self-responsibilisation and atomisation of the workforce. It does so by investigating organisations created with the aim of finding alternatives for freelancers, who epitomise the processes of individualisation typical of late capitalism. The organisations studied, both companies and cooperatives, aim to enable freelancers to combine autonomy in running their business with access to labour and social rights and inclusion in a collective. Drawing on a multiple case study conducted in France and Italy, the article investigates how organisations can counteract the processes of self-responsibilisation and atomisation of the workforce by enacting principles typical of alternative organisations. This study thus provides a twofold contribution to critical organisational theory and sociological literature on the individualisation of work and feasible alternatives to it. Our findings show, first, that the enterprise culture can be challenged through alternative organising even when freelancers – a category of workers embodying the contemporary processes of individualisation – are at stake. Second, the study of these emerging organisations also contributes to the flourishing debate on alternative organisations by adding an original empirical contribution to ongoing reflections on alternatives to market capitalism.