Freelancers, entrepreneurs, new ventures, but also incumbent firms increasingly use coworking spaces (CWS). The alignment of work-space and social space can facilitate organizational empowerment ...supporting individual work satisfaction. Our mixed-methods study of 328 respondents from CWS in 26 cities in the USA, Germany, and China identifies configurations of institutional patterns on work satisfaction associated with a sense of community, autonomy, participation, linkage multiplicity and mutual knowledge creation. High work satisfaction can occur in three different configurations related to a) agility housing, b) knowledge housing, and c) social housing. Our findings contribute to how incumbent firms and CWS can influence work satisfaction and empower towards innovation and entrepreneurial performance.
Using location theory as a starting point, this paper aims to understand how coworking spaces (CSs) locate within the city and how they reacted to the stress of COVID-19. Through a case study of the ...city of Montreal (Canada), we show that most CSs locate in areas of high transit accessibility and in central districts, but there is a trend – possibly accelerated by COVID – towards more suburban locations. These location strategies follow logics similar to those of Knowledge intensive services (KIS), including the tendency of some to agglomerate and of others to disperse. For some CSs, there is also heightened sensitivity to interactions with, and contributions to, the local community. Hence, faced with COVID, CSs in transit-accessible places combine an inward strategy, centralizing their activities around members, with a networking strategy, pooling some services and developing partnerships with local or other nearby CSs. Furthermore, CSs in peri-central neighbourhoods are the most vulnerable and have adopted retraction strategies. In contrast, CSs located in low accessibility districts outside the agglomeration adopt an expansion strategy, opening new branches near suburban residential areas to attract nearby workers. As hybrid work evolves, these results can help urban planners better understand the location rationales of CSs, how they adapt, and to what extent they bring added value to local urban development.
•Coworking Spaces have emerged as a new and promising phenomenon in entrepreneurship.•Coworking Spaces provide efficiency, flexibility, and legitimacy.•Coworking Spaces provide connections, ...solutions, energy/motivation, and social support.•Founders, minorities, women, non-market logic, and foreign entrepreneurs benefit more.•Coworking is growing and will continue to grow more after the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the past decade, coworking spaces have emerged as a new and promising phenomenon within entrepreneurship. Due to its prevalence, popularity, and potential for disruptive change, coworking is increasingly relevant to theory, practice, and policy in entrepreneurship, yet its implications are largely unstudied given the rapid rise of the phenomenon. Overall, more research is needed to inform owners, policy makers, and entrepreneurs regarding the effects of this new organizational form. This study takes an exploratory empirical approach with the goal of shedding light on the current landscape of coworking. By so doing, I provide an initial foundation for research on the coworking movement in entrepreneurship and the various research streams it can enrich.
Sharing spaces signify the idea of developing permanent and temporary workspaces, which tend to provide innovation activities through communities in the “fourth” place. The engagement of stakeholders ...in local communities likewise increases the group cohesion and resilience of the local creative ecosystem. However, research on CWS and resilience/adaptability is scarce, especially concerning coping mechanisms with the Covid19 pandemic. The paper aims to identify what challenges CWS from Central European countries faced during the Covid19 pandemic and understand how they reinvented practices to support resilience in the community-organisation-space nexus. Our qualitative analysis, based on interviews with community managers, suggests CWS in peripheries could attract and sustain a diversity of stakeholders with physical and virtual spaces to collaborate, enhancing the resilience of communities. On the other hand, it means increased pressure on community managers to provide infrastructure for the hybridization of collaborative spaces along with adaptability to cover new demands (HR development and infrastructure).
New Work, such as in coworking-spaces, offers greater task autonomy alongside permeable spatial, task, team, and leadership boundaries as compared to traditional work structures. New Work in ...coworking-spaces provides several advantages for sustainability and knowledge creation, yet it also faces competition and knowledge leakage risks. To understand the nexus of knowledge transfer and sustainability in New Work, we study the processes in coworking-spaces through interviews, observations, and secondary data. We compare environments with low- and high-sustainability targets of coworking-spaces. The results reveal that coworking-spaces can prime their audiences by exposing sustainability in their manifestos, communities, and physical spaces. Knowledge-sharing occurs in different zones of coworking-spaces in the forms of inspiration, problem-solving, synthesizing, and co-creation. The sustainability of coworking-spaces and knowledge-sharing therein is influenced by a shared community nested in the local environment. We develop a model of knowledge creation processes depending on the exposure of a coworking-space’s sustainability targets.
Contextualizing founder identity in coworking spaces Bouncken, Ricarda B.; Brownell, Katrina M.; Gantert, Till Marius ...
Journal of small business management,
01/2024, Volume:
ahead-of-print, Issue:
ahead-of-print
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Coworking spaces - which combine an office workspace with a social space - enable collaboration, creativity and knowledge exchange, and offer opportunities to develop social and professional networks ...for users. Using a multilevel approach, we integrate data from two sources - at the level of the coworking space (N = 57) and the entrepreneur (N = 317) - and apply SEM to test our hypotheses. Our study finds that innovation-based narratives generated by coworking space providers significantly influence new venture growth for entrepreneurs within the space. The results also show that the alignment between the entrepreneur's identity and the perceived social structure of a coworking space (the immediate entrepreneurial space) positively influences new venture growth. Taken together, we propose an extension to the founder identity literature by integrating psychological and sociological theories of identity to explain how the reciprocal relationship between context and identity is critical to new venture performance.
Different forms of coworking spaces have spread worldwide that use various artifacts (e.g., office settings, décor, furniture, equipment) to strengthen autonomy, flexibility, spontaneous ...interactions, and intrinsic motivation. However, the various manifestations of coworking spaces limit clearly defined boundary conditions for their successful implementation and demand a profound understanding of the interactions that take place among actors and artifacts. Using a flexible pattern matching approach, our study explains that artifacts can contour and create the possibilities for actors and define the borders, e.g., when, where, and with whom to communicate and work in coworking spaces. Our findings indicate that actors and artifacts are constitutively entangled in coworking spaces and play a key role in the community development process by fostering a shared understanding and identity, mutual interdependency, and common practices.
Les spatialités du coworking Lejoux, Patricia; Flipo, Aurore; Ortar, Nathalie
Carnets de géographes,
12/2023, Volume:
17, Issue:
17
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This paper looks at the development of new workplaces : coworking spaces (CSs). It aims to understand the spatial dimensions of coworking from an approach centered on agents, in this case creators of ...CSs and coworkers. Our results show that their spatiality is related to residential and occupational mobility. They consist of developing a professional project locally and/or working in the place where they want to live. They develop a special relationship with space through co-presence, spatial mobility and virtual mobility. They produce a new type of space made of flows and places. They have a network-based perception of space where CSs appear as hubs around which they organise their virtual, spatial and social mobilities at different time scales.
Our study applies legitimacy theorizing to service research, zooming in on co-prosumption service business models, which reside on significant direct contacts among provider-actors and customers as ...well as fellow customers in the service space. Our findings are based on a longitudinal flexible pattern matching method on 17 coworking spaces. The service cocreation nuances the double role of customers as evaluators and cocreators of legitimacy. This is because customers can have immediate perceptions of the actions and values of the services in their legitimacy evaluation while cocreating the service. Legitimacy shaped via social and recursive processes occurs in three stages: provisional, calibrated, and affirmed legitimacy. Findings inform four trajectory mechanisms of value-in-use pattern provenance, emergent Business Model development adaptive to the spatial context and loyal customers, visible trances as well as inside-out and outside-in identification processes. Further, the processes in the micro-ecosystem of an interstitial service space can develop a superordinate logic which overlays the potentially present coopetive and heterogenous institutional logics and interests of service customers.
Purpose
This paper aims to review the concept and characteristics of coworking space, especially physical and operational characteristics and its objectives. The authors propose three models of ...coworking spaces, such as revenue, synergistic and customer contact, which organizations can use as a part of their corporate real estate strategies to build workplace flexibility and resiliency. This paper also addresses research gaps and a research agenda for future research.
Methodology
This paper is a literature review of academic research focusing on coworking spaces. Because of the relatively limited existing academic literature on the topic, industry sources and white papers are also reviewed.
Findings
The authors categorized common threads of the existing literature on coworking spaces to emergence and growth trends, the types of users, the type of work to be completed in these spaces, characteristics of coworking spaces and the desired outcomes of coworking space models. Coworking spaces are expected to grow worldwide because of the increase in knowledge-based economy, the “digital nomad” lifestyle and mobile technologies, however, there is limited research on the relationship between spatial and operational characteristics of coworking spaces and users’ collaboration, social well-being and creativity. No research identified fully articulated the nuanced differences between the types of coworking spaces now found in the real estate ecosystem.
Research limitations
There is limited academic, empirical research focusing on coworking spaces. Thus, the search for literature itself is limited to a small number of papers. Although the authors extended the search to non-academic sources, the conclusion of this study is tentative because of the prematurity of the topic.
Originality/value
This paper urges the identification of research questions, considering the fast growth of coworking spaces and suggests future research directions based on newly proposed models. Industry practitioners, including building owners, managers, coworking space providers and corporate real estate practitioners, can consider using variations of coworking space concepts and characteristics, as they understand the importance of social needs and connectivity among users. By addressing the history of the coworking space as a concept and business model, and updating the types of models to include new coworking spaces, the authors provide further options to industry practitioners as to how to integrate coworking into their real estate.
PDF
