The politics of transforming social relations of work: making sense of a coworking hub in an outer-urban region

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the efforts of a group of residents of an outer-metropolitan council area to develop a grassroots coworking hub that would improve the working lives of members and support a more inclusive, connected and sustainable local economy. It considers the collective sense-making required to stabilise new sets of social relations, at work, in an era of ‘reforming capitalism’. Using a CCO and governmentality approach, we focus on the rhetorics in play and foreground the interests, agency and decisions of these residents. Bringing the politics of transforming social relations of work to the fore contributes to understanding changes in how work is organised and governed, and understanding the constitutive role of organisational communication. The paper argues a rhetoric of community is problematic for bringing into being a coworking organisation aiming for significant change to work and the economies in which it is embedded.

KEYWORDS:

• Transforming social relations of work
• coworking
• communicative constitution of organisations (CCO)
• rhetoric of community
• government of work
• reforming capitalism

Introduction

Before COVID-19 dramatically escalated the need for greater workplace flexibility, recent decades had already seen a significant shift, facilitated by ICT, from the traditional corporatised, office-based model of work towards more autonomous, flexible modes of working. Coworking is one approach used to support flexible work arrangements. Emerging in the early part of this century as a ‘third way’ of working and an intermediate between ‘a “standard” worklife within a traditional, well-delimited workplace in a community-like environment and an independent worklife as a freelancer … where the worker is based at home in isolation’ (Gandini 2015, 195), the coworking movement (Jones, Sundsted, and Bacigalupo 2009) has grown globally and exponentially. Large companies such as WeWork brought coworking into the mainstream of contemporary work practice and this widespread change to the geographical spaces within which paid work occurs has by now been the subject of considerable scholarship (Cnossen and Bencherki 2019; Cnossen and Stephenson 2022; Gandini 2015; Waters-Lynch et al. 2016).

One geography largely absent from these developments and studies is the outer-metropolitan: coworking is more usually embedded in inner-urban precincts. The present study considers the nascent formation of a coworking hub (hereafter, ‘The Hub’) initiated by a local entrepreneur in just such a rapidly growing outer-metropolitan region in Melbourne, Australia. The location, its working population and their evident needs promised to be a drawcard for The Hub. As it turned out, this was not the case.

The questions guiding our description and analysis of the little history of The Hub are, first, how did entrepreneurial discourse propel new work arrangements or instead impede their consolidation in an enduring organisational form? And second, what does this tell us about the current pull of ‘community’ – a concept ubiquitous in coworking and much analysed for the tensions and ambivalence it introduces to coworking’s promise of a collective workplace identity? Is the proposition of a community of businesses a viable path to transforming the social relations of work?

In several regards, our paper intersects with Waters-Lynch and Duff’s recent discussion of coworking. Their aim is not to add to critique of a generalised neoliberal work subjectivity in coworking sites, but to provide a positive conception of ‘commoning’ practices and how these can play a role in changing the ‘character of work’ as it is organised and governed (2021, 12). Waters-Lynch and Duff provide important theorisation of an ‘affective commons’ which includes as a foundational step ‘constructing a narrative of the commons’ (15). Our research with focus groups on The Hub provides empirical evidence to suggest problems with using ‘community’ as the basis of this narrative. We welcome commoning as a way to rethink work as social and what this can mean beyond the paradoxes of coworking community and its ‘ambivalent ethos’ (Bandinelli and Gandini 2019, 103). Our argument is that a rhetoric of community as a path to transform work from financialised to social relations, where we again work and produce ‘together’ (Bryan and Rafferty 2018), may be a failing project. This perception is fed – though certainly not proved – by the failure to get The Hub off the ground, despite evident need for coworking opportunities due to its outer-regional location and workforce.

To make our argument we first detail key assumptions we bring from CCO and a governmental framework in order to analyse the Hub as a nascent organisation; provide necessary information about The Hub and locate it in literature on coworking and community; present findings from the focus group data; before a concluding discussion connecting this evidence to the macro-politics of the changing economies in which work is embedded.

Politics and communication in the formation of social relations at work

Our research object in this study is the social practices of communication: the rhetorics and sense-making of the Hub members and would-be members who formed our focus groups, and as also found in website material associated with The Hub. These practices both perform, and are inscribed in, the social relations of power and authority involved in The Hub – at once a species of commercial sharing and envisaged as grassroots innovation driven by community-identified needs and social inclusion (McLaren and Agyeman 2018, 178). The communicative sense-making of the members and would-be participants tells us about the work of organising needed to establish and then stabilise relations of coordination and collaboration such that The Hub could be said to exist as an organisation.

Our analysis of these data is placed in a background frame of the government of populations, in a governmentality approach that treats rhetorics as integral to attempts to form and shape populations and their qualities and conduct (Dearman, Greenfield, and Williams 2018), in this case, to form an organisational population for a new coworking space. Describing these as rhetorics – formulated, styled and circulated arguments or propositions – rather than as discourses or frameworks brings to the fore their role in governing populations through persuasion, rather than treating rhetoric as mere surface or affective style. Our analysis treats the individuals involved with the Hub as a local population and considers the challenges in enrolling them in the kind of democratised-collaborative arrangements suggested by The Hub’s founding aim of being driven by social inclusion, community and grassroots involvement.

The use and circulation of rhetorics is at once attempted persuasion of an audience to some point of view or other, and the making available to people of the discursive means to make sense of situations in particular ways and to formulate their interests concerning these situations and make decisions about them, some of which may lead to action (depending on the means of action available) (Hindess 1989, 4). In this way, our study of the rhetorics, or rationalities, available to our study’s participants goes to the heart of their agency and understanding these participants as actors located within a twenty-first-century-government of working populations in Australia – part, amongst other things, of the formation of markets for, and participants in, the activity of coworking as new arrangements responding to a range of problematisations of existing work styles and workplaces. The government of populations provides us with a way of understanding what actually happens to people at an organisational level (Clegg 2019). Governing bodies, or authorities of some kind, attempt to govern by guiding the conduct of individuals by action at a distance in the form of rhetorics; the design of physical and digital infrastructure; and the persuasive circulation of social norms through, for example, authoritative texts (Kuhn 2008; Koschmann 2013) which ‘coordinate voluntary collective action’ and help bring about ‘the continual generation of an organisation’s identity’ (Koschmann 2012, 7–8).

Our methodology thus melds a governmentality frame with a communicative constitution of organisation (CCO) approach. CCO searches for ‘no true origin to action’ (Cooren and Fairhurst 2009, 139) within organisations (i.e. either structure or interpretative individuals) but considers the entire range of entities and practices involved in stabilising specific patterns of action and coordinating activities such that an organisation can be said to have been brought into being. CCO provides a vantage point on the threshold between organising efforts and the establishing of an organisation with a functioning collective identity – exactly the space occupied by The Hub.

Our description and analysis of the case of The Hub thus approaches this coworking initiative as a nascent organisation being ‘communicated into existence’ (Blagoev, Costas, and Kärreman 2019, 5). The focus group data collected for this study are presented not simply as reflective of various aspects of this coworking initiative but as an indicative slice of the activity and efforts at collaboration and coordinated action required to bring it into being as an organisation. Participants were not only talking about coworking during our focus groups but were actively engaged during these discussions in the processes involved in forming an organisational population of those already participating or interested in The Hub coworking initiative. The rhetorics observed during these discussions provide key (though not all of the) conditions of agency for those involved.

The Hub

The Hub was initiated by a local entrepreneur (hereafter, ‘The Initiator’). It capitalised on the functionality afforded by ICT and the Internet to enable residents of an outer-metropolitan region in Melbourne, Australia (hereafter, ‘The Area’) to collaborate and network their small businesses and solo enterprises. The aim was to grow a shared virtual space and, it was hoped, to ultimately transition from its concurrent offering of occasional pop-up spaces to having a permanent physical space that would provide economic benefits for members at the same time as fostering a sense of community. The Hub’s ultimate aim was to improve the liveability and sustainability of this outer-suburban region by supporting a more inclusive, connected and sustainable economy. The Area was thus replete with challenge, need, and opportunity – the latter because of the skills and qualifications profile of the area’s demographics, and because of growing popular knowledge about coworking as an alternative and attractive work mode.

The efforts of The Initiator to build on the trend towards coworking was part of her broader objective to shape a ‘B Corp’¹ organisation capable of embracing the social responsibilities of business in an under-resourced, outer-urban region of a global city. The Initiator saw a demonstrated need for such a coworking hub because the municipality concerned, despite being part of a world renowned ‘liveable city’ (Chalkley-Rodan 2017), suffers, like many outer-suburbs, from a myriad of challenges because of having one of the fastest growing populations in the country (98% growth between 2006–2016) but insufficient infrastructure to support this growth. Comprehensive government inquiries into the liveability of this major city have acknowledged that urgent attention is needed to address the challenges faced by growth areas in its outer-metropolitan regions (Victoria Parliament 2013). Our interest was in how the development of a local community-based solution to long commutes, urban sprawl, declining quality of family life, and concentration of employment in the inner city could realise missing elements in this city’s much-vaunted liveability. The Hub initiative resonated with Plan Melbourne 2017–2050, the Victorian Government’s long-term planning strategy, and in particular with its vision of ‘20-minute neighbourhoods’ (Victoria State Government n.d.) – this within the context of a projected expansion of the city from 4.6 to 8 million population over the next three decades (Victoria Planning Authority n.d.) with a significant proportion of this growth in outer suburban areas. Such a vision has only become more relevant in the post-COVID era (Kaufman 2020) where working from home has become a norm rather than an exception.

In Australia, coworking spaces grew 297% between 2013 and 2017 (Meunier 2018). However, more than half (54%) of the coworking spaces in Australia are located in city and inner-metro areas, 13% in inner suburban, 12% in suburban, and 15% in regional areas (Mahlberg and Riemer 2017, 16), while only 7% of coworking spaces are found in outer suburban areas (Mahlberg and Riemer 2017, 16). Uptake lags in areas that would aid liveability and sustainability for many workers. Hence our interest in The Hub as addressing a significant problem, as well as with The Hub’s fate. The need in these areas for coworking seems clear: formation of people’s interests to address this need through coworking is another matter.

The Initiator grounded her efforts to establish The Hub in her own experience of shifting out of a corporate career in an established office workplace based in the central business district (CBD), through a period of major illness and recovery with accompanying social isolation. Its founder was involved in, amongst other things, a search for social meaning. The Hub fits what Rosencrans (2019, ii–iii) found about other, nonconventional coworking initiatives: that they are ‘story-rich’, involving ‘sense-making stories about systemic problems and the need for inventive, positive, and generative change’. The Hub does this through The Initiator’s B Corp approach and their appeal to ‘community’ in an outer-metropolitan locality. Could an entrepreneur committed to the social responsibilities of business effectively stabilise an innovative organisation capable of marrying business-focused objectives with community-focused localism? Is building a ‘community of businesses’ the path to transforming the social relations of work?

Our approach to The Hub’s attempts to incorporate social responsibilities into business pays attention to the rationalities and rhetorics that are part of any democratising reform. This assumes that organisational actors are sense-making individuals (Claydon 2013; Clegg, Kornberger, and Pitsis 2011; Thompson 1982) and their agency rests in part on the rationalities available to them. The micro-politics involved in transforming the working lives of this case study’s outer-urban population shifts the focus from coworking as an unproblematic meeting of common needs toward the negotiation of differing interests, seeing this as crucial to the formation of social relations necessary to establish a new organisation. Various rationalities and rhetorics come to the fore – in particular the role of a rhetoric of community, emerging from the empirical data afforded by our case study, confirming the coworking and governmentality literature.

Coworking and community

As a change in the nature of the workplace, as a new organisational form, and as the invention of a new hybrid or ‘third space’ that brings together workers as members of pragmatically chosen and/or like-minded communities of individual professionals, coworking sits at the junction of early optimism around the sharing economy, ambitions for continuous innovation through serendipitous networking, and the corporate strategy of international players such as WeWork, as well as involving individually-borne negatives such as the social and professional isolation of working from home and less than optimum communications infrastructure. Subsequent impacts of COVID-19 on work practices have added to interest in the key challenges of the ‘working from home’ model necessitated by the global pandemic, with isolation joined by the distractions of the home, often sub-optimal access to ICT and other resources, as well as the broader challenge of coordinating social relations of work across both online and physical spaces.

The pervasive role of the notion of ‘community’ in coworking is a staple of the literature. Many studies, particularly those of the early beginnings of coworking hubs, emphasise the community-based organisational characteristics of coworking spaces (Butcher 2016; Capdevila 2014; Garrett, Spreitzer, and Bacevice 2017; Spinuzzi et al. 2019): pioneering founders and participants bonded around shared values based on a desire for alternative ways of working to those of the corporate world, as well as on shared professional identities, in particular as workers in creative, often technology-based industries such as web design. Early coworking spaces, Butcher (2016) reports, had a ‘handmade feel’ with ‘no plan to grow’ (97); and organisationally, ‘communal rituals were informally observed by its members and reinforced by its host’ (97–98) in a distinct, collective habitus which both included people (as insiders) and excluded those not ‘in the know’.

However, in Butcher’s view, community ‘is not scalable’. A ‘tension between community idealism and the organisational realities of co-workers’ (Butcher 2016, 95) has meant that, ‘while some coworking ventures are small-scale, others are grown only by adopting the norms of conventional organisations’ (94–95). Bouncken and Reuschl (2018) identify two different functions of coworking-spaces: sharing of office spaces (i.e. physical assets such as office and infrastructure); and sharing of social spaces (e.g. for socialisation and sharing of knowledge). The former need has led to a more corporatised form of coworking and the emergence of large global companies such as WeWork and JustCo as part of a trend toward ‘mediated commercial sharing’ (McLaren and Agyeman 2018, 173). These companies nevertheless maintain a traditional coworking branding and ethos: WeWork’s stated mission is ‘to build more than beautiful, shared office spaces. We wanted to build a community. A place you join as an individual, “me”, but where you become part of a greater “we” … Community is our catalyst’ (WeWork 2019). The ‘symbols of community are thus adapted for entrepreneurial identity work, and commodified … ’ (Butcher 2016, 100). Understanding but diverging from Butcher’s justifiable quizzing of the actual, symbolic or commodified character of community as a sociological feature of social relations per se (Amit and Rapport 2002), our sights are on community as governmental and historically particular.

Coworking is a mode of organising people’s work in a relatively recent shift away from formal to informal organisations (Du Gay and Lopdrup-Hjorth 2016), a turn-of-the-century ‘enterprisation’ of organisations (Du Gay 2004) and a trend away from bureaucracy and hierarchical organisational structures (Clegg, Kornberger, and Pitsis 2011). It can be seen as part of a wider governing rationality about networked forms of organisation (Thompson 2004) and an attendant reshaping of social relations as ‘community’ has superseded ‘society’ as the terrain of government. A community, in this twenty-first-century sense, is a grouping that is freely joined, impelled by an individual’s own interests, and in contradistinction to the membership of a society, which is experienced as an entity where one finds oneself with non-negotiable obligations. Distinct from its long history in political thought, community was thus made technical, a tool with which to govern (Miller and Rose 2008, 89). This reshaping of social relations has been an integral part of governing digitally networked populations. As a host of activities in knowledge economies – productive work as well as shopping, education and provision of services – has migrated online, the invitation to individual users to think of themselves as part of communities (that is, part of various kinds of ‘we’) has become ubiquitous. Coworking as a new form of organising work is set within these broader trends.

This prevalent twenty-first-century-version of community as a ‘community of individuals’ (Coworking Europe 2016 q in Bandinelli and Gandini 2019, 97) provides a story of collective identity that never usurps the priority of the hyper-individual self of financialised economies (Bryan and Rafferty 2018; Dearman, Greenfield, and Williams 2018; Gregg 2018). While tensions between collective and individual rationality have been captured in Bandinelli and Gandini’s useful concept of ‘collaborative individualism’ (2019), the exploration of this neoliberal subjectivity exemplified in coworking (Bandinelli 2020) rests its political significance in unveiling the paradoxes of neoliberalism – the central figure of the freely choosing individual required to embrace flexibility and forms of conduct that align with authorities beyond itself. Diverging from this aim, the politics we are concerned with is how social relations of work may be shifted out of this paradox.

While Waters-Lynch and Duff’s (2021) recent exploration of coworking continues Butcher’s consideration of the commodification of coworking and the ‘pervasive veneration of the notion of “community” by Coworking advocates’ (Waters-Lynch and Duff 2021, 384), as noted earlier their interest is in the legitimacy of coworking as a ‘commons-oriented project’ (387). They draw on Ostrom’s (1990) work on the economics of the commons, and the value creation, affective labour, and shared commitment to collective action that it involves. This suggestive path of considering coworking as a form of commons, and the affective, immaterial labour and atmospheres entailed in establishing and maintaining such a commons, dovetails with our view of coworking spaces as sites involving the necessary governing of a local population: shaping and attempting to align the dispositions, conduct and resultant outcomes of social relations between the individual members of the organisational population. Waters-Lynch and Duff treat this issue theoretically. We consider it empirically by describing the governmental politics of forming the social relations needed for a coworking organisation and population to come into existence.

As Waters-Lynch and Duff (2021, 385) put it, there are ‘unique governance challenges’ in managing an affective commons. First, a foundational narrative of the commons is needed, so that ‘participants at least understand and ideally share [a] perspective on the logic of collective action’ (14). Participation in decision-making and visibility of people’s actions to others are other key commoning practices (13,15). We will return briefly in our concluding discussion to these commoning practices and flag a rhetoric of publicness, rather than community, as better providing the story of collective action and producing a different ‘we’.

The case study presented here, involving focus group discussions amongst those involved or interested in coworking in an outer-metropolitan locale as well as examination of website material associated with The Hub, captures how the participants talked about and thus conceptualised both the advantages and challenges implicated in extending the coworking concept beyond inner-urban areas, and what sense they attributed to coworking as ‘community’.

Methods

Case study

A case study approach investigated the efforts of a group of people to develop a grassroots coworking hub and the challenges they encountered. The case study involves examination of data from four focus group sessions as well as documentary website material associated with The Hub, enabling an in-depth investigation of this coworking initiative within its specific context (Yin and Campbell 2018).

The Hub was selected using purposive sampling to provide a case which was: (1) in the early stages of establishing a coworking space, in order to capture a snapshot of how this organisational type is formed through the communication of the participants in focus groups; and (2) located in an outer-suburban area, to capture the distinguishing characteristics of attempts to form a coworking space within this particular setting. Following their participation in a ‘hack-a-thon’ event discussing a model of the ‘Plan Melbourne 20-minute neighbourhood’, two of the researchers identified The Hub as meeting these two criteria and suitable for the study. The research team met with The Initiator of The Hub, who provided a detailed overview of her vision for the coworking space and its current operations and agreed to act as a gatekeeper to participants in the study. In order to recruit participants, the Initiator placed an advertisement for focus groups on the website and Facebook page of The Hub. The researchers also emailed people from The Area who had attended the Plan Melbourne 20-minute neighbourhood hackathon event and had expressed an interest in the research.

Four 1.5-hour focus groups were carried out with residents of The Area over a two-week period. The focus group questions by moderators addressed: the participants’ familiarity with The Hub or with coworking in general; their perceptions and feelings about the local environment including issues of liveability in The Area; their conceptions of and needs for a local coworking space; and their views about key players involved in the development of the coworking space. Each focus group involved five to eight participants with a total of twenty-five participants across the four groups. In this paper, participants are given pseudonyms, and each transcript is assigned a number, T1-4. Each focus group was facilitated by one or two of the researchers (five researchers in total). Each focus group was audio-recorded and fully transcribed for subsequent analysis. Table 1 summarises the key characteristics of the participants.

Table 1. Characteristics of focus group participants.

Participant characteristics	Description
Age range	28–72 years
Gender	12 females 13 males
Occupation	9 Business advisor/consultancy 6 Training/career advisory 4 IT/marketing business 4 Creative/design 2 Currently developing business concepts while remaining in full-time corporate employment
Membership status	10 joined the coworking space within the first year of its foundation (2-year members) 8 joined during the last year (users) 7 newcomers

The participants were diverse across age and gender and occupation, working mostly in creative jobs or in the knowledge economy. They were also diverse in their level of cognitive and emotional investment in coworking and, in particular, the Hub initiative. To some extent, this correlated with the ‘membership status’ category in Table 1, with ‘2-year/foundation members’, more recently joined ‘users’, and lastly ‘newcomers’. What they all shared was a geosocial locale, The Area. Their exchange of views about what coworking was in general, about what they knew and thought of The Hub, and about their experience of and needs flowing from working and living in their outer-urban Area, provided the basis for our thematic analysis. This was conducted following the ‘six-phase’ approach outlined in Braun and Clarke (2006), and clarified in Braun et al. (2019, 852) ‘as a reflexive and recursive, rather than strictly linear, process’: familiarisation; generating codes; constructing themes (‘Candidate themes’); revising themes; defining themes; and producing the report. Beyond ‘what participants said in relation to a topic or issue’ (as in a preliminary ‘domain summary’ approach), themes are understood in terms of ‘a pattern of shared meaning, organised around … a central organizing concept’ (Braun et al. 2019, 845–846).

Thus, from the focus group data, while Allan (T4) says,

(The Hub), the way I see it, is an environment for small business, especially people that are working alone, to network, to meet other people, and collaborate … it’s collaboration, of seeing somebody to work with, somebody who is alike in some respects, and help each other … 

and Linda (T4) says,

I’d really like to connect locally, um, with the space ah, and the need for coworking locally … 

a central organising concept here, distributed across terms such as ‘collaborate’ and ‘connect locally’, is identified as the theme of (local) ‘community’. Only Phil (T2), talking about The Hub, explicitly uses the term community and invokes it as an entity,

 … so, it’s really driven from the community … it’s more than just a business … 

but the elements of shared location or environment, of alike-ness of some kind, and of potential joint action of some kind,² arguably qualify these as a shared invocation of community.

Findings

What were the focus groups like, how did they proceed, what happened in them? Common in each was participants sharing, acknowledging, and commiserating over common experiences of living in an outer-metropolitan area, and suffering either long commutes to work, or the isolation and infrastructural limitations of working from home (network speed, inadequate space, and lack of a ‘professional’ environment for clients). There was sharing and agreement over difficulties The Area faced in attracting investment and defending itself against unwarranted cultural stigma about its population make-up and social problems such as rates of domestic violence. These exchanges, mutually confirmatory and repeating, served to cement agreement across all participants and focus groups, justifying our identification of six clear themes. We grouped these into (a) needs that drove establishment of the Hub, and (b) problems faced in establishing and growing it. (See Table 2 for the six themes, provided schematically given space constraints and uniform lack of contention in the exchanges from which we induced them.) We named these grouped themes ‘Common Ground’. If they had been exhaustive of the focus group discussions, they may well have provided the communicative glue and clear articulation of organisational purpose (Quattrone 2022) needed for the nascent Hub to consolidate and grow.

Table 2. Summary of common ground themes.

Common ground: Needs and problems addressed by The Hub
Needs that drive establishment of The Hub	Social connection – Desire to counteract social isolation of working from home
	Financial and resource constraints – ICT, sub-optimum Internet – Office space and equipment
	Sustainability and liveability – Reduction of long commute to the CBD for employment – Impact of long hours on households and family life – Socio-economic issues, building local economy
	Financial capital – Lack of financial resources to establish The Hub
	Regulatory constraints – Legal requirements impede securement of permanent physical space
	Stigma of outer suburbia – Lack of clients willing to travel to this outer-suburb

But there was other sharing too – of some people’s experience of and information about CBD coworking spaces, what they offered and cost, and about local meetings of the BNI organisation, and a relatively nearby State Government Business accelerator. Unlike the sharing around needs and problems, these points of information and experience were often caught up in agonistic exchanges between participants about the nature and value of the differently conceived Hub, providing foils for those committed to its superiority. These agonistic exchanges – or discursive arm-wrestles – furnished the more interesting and suggestive evidence about how rhetoric of community performed. We describe a number in detail.

In different ways across the focus groups, the 7 ‘newcomers’ were in the position of being informed, but also invited, persuaded, at times ‘schooled’, by the ‘2-year members’ as well as some less seasoned ‘users’, about how to make sense of the Hub. They were invited to step into the story of its promise (and thereby be able to formulate their interests to themselves in terms of that story).³ Frequently a noticeable ‘dance’ occurred between newcomers and 2-year members as participants proffered accounts of the Hub and their views about their work and work more generally – in effect, what work is and what it should be. Thus they laid out positions for other participants to step into and employ – or not, in various ways (to ignore, evade, contest, resist). This dance characterised all the focus groups, but especially groups 4, 3 and 2: loudly, in groups 4 and 3 with one or two, key, dominant voices, and in group 3, with an additional, insistently questioning and resisting voice; evidently, but more diffused, in group 2; and less expansively in group 1, where there was a preponderant attention to shared infrastructural business needs rather than what the Hub and its vision is.

This dance, discursive arm-wrestles, or agonistic exchanges, involved different modes of address marked by differentiating inscriptions (Cooren and Fairhurst 2009; Latour 1990): ‘collaboration’, ‘networking’, varying deployments of ‘community’ (as geographic locale, as thick collective identity, as ‘us’/ ‘the people’). Some significant examples of the turn-taking, insistence, acquiescence, resistance and refusal around these inscriptions, or conceptual stakes, are described below (with quoted data in italics).

Focus group 4

In one focus group session (T4), Allan introduced himself as ‘knowledge business consultant’, ‘life coach’ and ‘business coach’, established his authority early by reciting a long and extensive corporate environment skill set, and then identified himself as a Hub ‘founding member’. Allan was the first to take up the Moderator’s invitation to talk about ‘the need and the value’ in The Hub. While Tony, a chartered accountant and newcomer to The Hub, accepted the Moderator’s identification of the group’s need to have The Hub explained (Tony: ‘yeah, thanks’), Allan went straight to the issue of value, using a knowledge economy address to the group:

The Hub, the way I see it, is, um, an environment for small business, especially people that are working alone, to network, to meet other people, and collaborate. That’s the keyword: it’s not so much networking, it’s collaboration, of seeing somebody to work with, somebody who is alike in some respects, ah, and help each other, Yeah?

Allan first raised, then negated ‘networking’ as an appropriate description. His remarks continued on to place him in the role of translator, moving perceptions of The Hub away from an earlier and commonplace business vocabulary of networking (stretching all the way back to Dale Carnegie’s seminal business advice) and onto the terrain of collaboration. (We earlier quoted Allan’s words to trace our induction of the theme of community: it is the case that collaboration is routinely used as an index of community. Here, we want to note more precisely the valence of ‘collaboration’ in summoning up community.) ‘Collaboration’ is a central staple of the ‘cultural circuit of capital’ which distinguishes knowledge capitalism (Thrift 2005, 14–15). This circuit is an ‘institution’ and ‘machine’ for a mass circulation of business knowledge (Thrift 2001, 415) central to capital as a store of advantage in knowledge economies. Along with ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’, collaboration is the ubiquitously promoted answer to finding new sources of value, especially from tapping tacit knowledge, in the attempt ‘to squeeze every last drop of value out of [capitalism] by increasing the rate of innovation and invention through the acceleration of collective mutation’ (Thrift 2005, 281). As the German business advisory puts it, ‘Improved collaboration makes companies more productive and agile’ (Blackboat.com). Allan’s words served to translate the value of the Hub into knowledge economy common sense. His encouragement to collaborate – ‘ah, and help each other. Yeah?’ – was encouragement to accept and step into his story of The Hub as part of an affective capitalism which prioritises sharing.

Subsequent exchanges between the Moderator and Rosemary, a business management consultant, and Linda, who runs a marketing agency, elicited agreement about their locality and its needs. However, the group’s attention was soon turned back to collaboration through Jason, an education business owner. In a non sequitur he identified himself in relation to the Initiator and as being – ‘into the same area of collaboration because that’s the key’. Jason, who also sits on a local council committee, proceeded to talk about details of the local population and the tracking of people’s work commute through data colour coding – ‘the blue dots … the yellow dot is all in the city’. This shifted the group back to the matter of a basic need for a local coworking space. Mention of the blue and yellow data coding of population movement moved Tony to chip in (‘yes!’). His was a response to and affirmation of the down-to-earth geographic need for The Hub. This was a point of agreement for all in the group: Allan weighed in at some length with statistical knowledge and estimations of required ‘critical mass’, accompanied by Tony’s phatic affirmation of the significance of what he was hearing. However, Allan was shortly back to the ‘need to work in collaboration’. Tony’s interest then diverged from Allan’s theme of collaboration. He sought in its stead some practical information: ‘has anyone been taken to a new business centre near Melton? I’ve got a colleague, he works from home, but whenever he needs an office he operates from this new centre at Melton’. In a back-and-forth series of exchanges, Allan queried the costliness of the Melton centre [competition for the would-be Hub]. Tony met the query with the information ‘it costs him almost nothing’, before Jason offered up information to Tony about other corporate coworking spaces in the CBD and then returned the discussion to ‘the beauty of coworking space … cause I love collaboration, and the beauty of coworking space, it got – other people, like other entrepreneurs that you can really support each other’.

Here and beyond, the turn-taking and Allan’s and Jason’s remarks performed a concerted effort to shift Tony into the story of collaboration. This is best described as envelopment, as the topic moved back and forth between a register of practical information-seeking and provision, and higher-level abstract business concepts. At one point, newcomer Tony seemed persuadable, as Allan continued to stress the limitations of networking, criticising BNI meetings in The Area: ‘but it’s a pure networking environment’. Tony at first chimed in ‘I didn’t like [BNI] … ’, but quickly shifted to an admiring tone:

But then what surprised me was the energy in that meeting … I wasn’t comfortable … to stand up and try and give referrals to everyone else … but the thing about it was, whatever was happening, it had a lot of energy, and if that energy could somehow be transposed into this [Hub] group.

Focus group 3

The distinction between networking versus collaboration also featured in focus group 3. Phil is an insurance broker and newcomer. His stated understanding of The Hub enacted a process of having to work out the puzzle of the initiative, a repeated feature of the focus groups.

Originally I thought it was basically going to be more of a – a networking environment … but it’s more than that, um, I think the word is collaborative … and you mentioned the social aspect of it as well it’s very informal, um, so it’s really driven from the community, which I like … 

Nevertheless, towards the end of the session, when the Moderator asked everyone for their keyword about the Hub, Phil’s was ‘network’. This was his perception, or hope, despite concerted emphasising to the contrary from Abhi (a digital media marketer, Hub member and helping the Hub communicate its ‘multilayer concept, not straightforward run of the mill business idea’, and whose keyword is ‘greater cause’); and from Maria (2-year member and starting a manufacturing business). Maria spelt it out:

we know that it’s – this collaboration sort of thing, that makes The Hub really what it is. So I think this place is different from the other coworking spaces that we’ve been, which are very driven on the space, um who we connect? … in here it’s more, it’s human sort of interaction.

Maria’s and Abhi’s energetic promotion of the correct view of the Hub as collaborative, as ‘like a social enterprise’ (Abhi), was joined by Samantha (2-year member, running two businesses) and her consistent reference to the Hub as ‘community participation’, ‘community feeling’:

yeah people usually have a notion – coworking, how is that going to work for me, what’s in it for me … But then, it has the fact that people gain more, when they come out of the – outside of their old little confined space of me, me, me … and that’s when the – It’s all about putting themselves forward, putting the community before themselves, and that’s when they start getting results.

Phil, despite seeming persuadable to a much broader view of the Hub he was hearing about than ‘networking’, did not end up in the story of collaboration, community and social enterprise that dominated in focus group 4. An even clearer resistance to it as a meaningful way to grasp The Hub came from Kathryn, running a creative photography business and a jewellery line, and recently moved from the inner city to the Area. In the discussion, Kathryn heard from Maria – ‘I understand the difficulty, when I first approached [the Initiator] I also didn’t understand really' – and from Samantha as she described The Hub ‘not as a business, I mean not run by – it’s not about that’. But neither’s words satisfied Kathryn and she explicitly called out confusion around what The Hub is and what the Initiator intends: ‘it sounds like there’s too many things’, ‘I mean I see what she’s trying to do, she’s trying to get a … I don’t know, – I can’t see where it’s – what she’s trying to do’. While she wrestled with the community story – ‘I guess that’s [staying in the Area to work for the day] where mainly a community-based, ah, council-based space does work’ – she was aware of the gulf between this idea and Samantha and Maria’s community story: ‘I don’t know – it’s like there’s two different – we’re coming from two different directions’. (This did not, however, perturb Samantha at all: ‘but that inspires you to grow’).

With this obdurate confusion front and centre in the focus group and Kathryn refusing to give up on it – ‘like, we’re just talking about, like, massive different things’ – towards the end of the session Maria provided an explanation for any lack of clarity around the Hub.

how I see it is that, Sara is trying to give us tools so we can drive it. You know, so it’s not – she’s saying, hey you guys, go and – she’s quite busy all the time trying to get resources, trying to get you know, but I think it’s up to us, really, for that’s how I see it, and I think that’s how she envisages – clarity would be nice, but how can you be that clear in something that is up to more to us, you know, it’s not for her to be pushing, it’s for us to, I think

Kathryn remained unconvinced, pursuing her interest in a ‘government-run space … councils that run that kind of thing’.

Focus groups 2 and 1

In focus group 2, Patrick was another not pulled into the story of The Hub as ‘run by the people for the people’. This populist description was John’s account of the difference between The Hub and BNI. John is a 1-year member and business coach mentor, and articulated the promise of The Hub:

you’d end up with a – a community of businesses that would actually help each other, and work together. And if they had that idea that we’re here to help each other, not we’re here – we’re not here to stab each other in the back and I’m the big cheese, would help everyone, and then everyone’s a winner.

Patrick is a consultant and recently joined member. When John approvingly described The Hub as ‘what you might call an activist group’, Patrick sidestepped this claim, instead giving the group Economics-101-advice about the investment challenges for The Hub. Responding to a suggestion that a video could be made for people to find out about the novel features of The Hub Patrick stated: ‘I don’t want to read people’s stories. There’s so many inspirational stories of small business owners, I’m tired of that … What I would like, is a list, that says “here are all the things”’. Patrick just wants the goods. Similarly, in focus group 1, Joshua, a newcomer and small business owner, said ‘my expectation of a coworking space is a desk, I don’t care about networking, I don’t care about socialising, I don’t care about anything, I want a desk, a printer … ’

Patrick, Joshua, Phil, Kathryn and others spread across the focus groups palpably did not make sense of their selves and their interests fitting in the community that Linda presents (T4). Articulating the Initiator’s approach, Linda evoked the assumed origin for The Hub through this account:

rather than find the space then find the people, reverse that and get the community … because now that there’s a community … a stronger and more collective voice … there are examples of coworking days and things like that.

Discussion

The divergent sense-making around the nature of The Hub makes it difficult for the participants to agree on how a local coworking hub could work, even though there was ample shared meaning around the problems that The Hub was designed to address and the challenges in developing The Hub. The focus group discussions could be seen simply as incommensurate discourses. However, trying to capture the agonistic nature of the exchanges, the moves to persuade newcomer participants and their moves to resist, describes the formation of a population with specific relations of difference amongst its individual members. Many of those not already invested in The Hub were unable to make an assessment of the organisation to formulate whether it was in their own interests to have further involvement with it. In crucial respects, the vision of the Initiator of The Hub and of Hub 2-year members didn’t join up with the sense-making of other focus group participants.

In CCO terms, one important thing that is arguably missing is the persuasion of an ‘authoritative text’ (Koschmann 2013). Candidates for such an authoritative text were, as we might expect, The Hub’s Mission & Vision Statements and an accompanying colourful Venn diagram of ‘Community’, ‘local Biz’, ‘Corporate & Local Stakeholders’ meeting in a ‘Collaborative Sweet Spot’. The diagram announces itself as ‘[The Hub] Collaborative Market Place’.

The rhetorics evident in these documents run along much the same lines as we found in our thematic analysis of the focus group discussions. Elements from both documents can be presumed to have provided a context and materials for the setting up of the Hub and its presentation to residents of The Area, so comments by the focus group participants can be read in part as a response to these rhetorics. The Mission & Vision Statements, and the illustrative diagram of The Hub’s ‘collaborative sweet spot’ promise everything: The Hub ‘empowers locals’, ‘connects likeminded locals’, ‘enrich[es] our members’ lives’, ‘facilitat[es] authentic conversations’ – and ‘inspires’ them too – ‘activate[s] communities’, ‘fosters authentic relationships’, and helps ‘local businesses and their customers … build stronger relationships, trust and nurture collaboration’. It ‘wants to unchain the world of work from city centres’, and ‘to be the glue that brings local communities together’. It will do this by providing the ‘Collaborative Sweet Spot’ through ‘peer-to-peer support, events, workshops, coworking friendly spaces and a holistic, inclusive digital marketplace that makes building a local network easier and more affordable’.

The Hub appears to offer something for everyone; so why isn’t everyone persuaded to adopt these propositions and see The Hub as in their interest? For a start we can say that less is probably more (together the documents run to four pages). This is a straightforward communication lesson that doesn’t require a CCO explanation. But what of the multiple rhetorics (stylised propositions): a rhetoric of community, of small business, of collaborative work, of locality, of social purpose, of the future of work, and of authenticity? Marshalled together, these rhetorics offer to make sense of what a new entity, The Hub, is, what kind of world it responds to (replete with IT, products and services, and hunger for trust, authenticity and connection), and what it will offer. The statements’ hybrid form of address is to individuals as economic actors (consumers, businesspeople, workers), located (in outer-metro areas), and eager to connect and collaborate with the likeminded or those with similar needs. The rhetoric of community leads: ‘We seek to build a strong ethos around community … creating opportunities for people to work in the same postcode in which they live’. But the invitation is made first to the independent rational actor of economic and business calculation – as subjects of interest⁴ – though distinguished as actors who bring with them an interest in things local, authentic and for social purpose. The promise is to bring together a community from such individuals, something like John’s (T2) ‘community of businesses’. The knowledge economy mode of address around collaboration we noted from focus group 4 only consolidates this; collaboration is the rationally economic way to produce value.

What our analysis shows is that this vocabulary of business with social values, the characteristic offer of B2 Corporations and ESG, did not persuade all in the focus groups, nor enough (beyond the focus groups) to see The Hub develop and grow as originally intended. The instability of the offer involved was evident in the focus groups, where appeals for involvement both by local council and large corporate institutions were met with concerns that the community spirit of coworking might be negatively affected by such involvement.

No normative criticism of the Initiator of The Hub’s B2 Corporation motivation is implied when we observe that the rhetoric of community and a grassroots collaboration struggled to plausibly unite a contemporary transactional business ethos with a culture of social purpose and sustainability. This problem does not belong to The Hub alone: it is part of a much bigger puzzle today as ‘ardent capitalist[s]’ across the world consider and indeed endorse the inclusion of social value in a reformation of capitalism (MacKenzie 2020; Quattrone 2022). There may be widespread interest in a social licence for business, but such overtures to remaking the enterprise forms of financialised economies are being played out in a period of much distrust when people have been formed and governed as investors making individual financial calculations (Bryan and Rafferty 2018, 53).

To elaborate, this conjuncture has been framed by famed CEOs, economic commentators and politicians as a period of – or a moment for – ‘reforming capitalism’ (Chalmers 2023; Dalio 2020; Edgecliffe-Johnson 2019; Ramanna 2020; Wolf 2019). It is a moment notable for the revival of heterodox economic ideas, uncertainty driven by environmental and geopolitical crises and by democratic deconsolidation, and noisy arguments about future directions. It was accelerated by State responses to COVID-19 and built on: a prior trend of corporations and small businesses embracing social responsibilities through recognition of the need for a social licence and adoption of Environmental, Social and Governance principles (ESG) (Tett 2021); a resurgent attention to political economic questions of distribution (Boushey, De Long, and Steinbaum 2017; Piketty 2014) after their sidelining in the formation of financialised capitalism; economists’ influential arguments for public purpose missions (Kattel and Mazzucato 2018; Mazzucato 2018, 2021) responsive to society-wide problems of wealth inequality, and ecological as well as economic sustainability (The British Academy 2018); and the recognised need for these problems to be addressed to avert further weakening of democracies world-wide. More recently, an increasingly visible rejoinder to these reformist ambitions reframes them as a woke capitalism that it is vital to resist and repel (Bartholomeusz 2023; Ramaswamy 2021; Rhodes 2022). Even before this resistance gathered steam, up for question was whether and how the social responsibilities of ESG are substantively being shouldered and progress achieved towards a reformed capitalism. What kind of reform and for whom? Is it properly democratising reform – responsive to widely differing social, cultural and geopolitical circumstances of individuals and groups working and living in capitalist economies? Such a reinvention or reimagining of capitalism would, at the least, counter the retreat from a ‘social agenda of work’ (employment contracts complying with ‘social minima of living standards, safety, fairness and dignity’) that has steadily installed the financialisation of work and labour coming to be ‘as much as possible, like just another production input’ (Bryan and Rafferty 2018, 60), with workers conducting themselves like ‘bits of liquid capital’ (49). Or would ‘reforming capitalism’ simply signal the endless flexibility of capitalism (Thrift 2005) but maintain the path dependency of its late twentieth-century-financialised mutation?

Our interest in the fortunes of an outer-regional coworking Hub sits within these significant currents of political argument and disparate efforts at either maintaining, reforming or even transforming social relations of production and consumption. We want to draw together the present political economic and cultural moment of loosely allied actors’ calls for the reformation of financialised capitalism – this, rather than the generalised context of neoliberalism within which coworking is often analysed – with observations on the present-day value of a rhetoric of community. The story of the coworking Hub, with its ambitions for positive change to reform work and business through constituting itself as a grassroots-driven community, indicate problems with relying on the proposition of ‘community’ to reimagine capitalism.

Conclusion

The effort to establish The Hub as an organisation providing connection for locals and a coworking space in an outer-suburban population growth corridor was handled as setting up a democratised – grass roots – community Hub, one whose culture and ethos were not that of big business (e.g. WeWork, or major corporations), nor of the public sector (a Council calling the shots), but of SMEs and B2 Corporations. But the use of a rhetoric of community, so central to forming coworking organisations in inner-urban areas, is not the best path to build more sustainable and inclusive social relations amongst all populations, including those in outer-urban areas. If a technology of community – as a bunch of ‘I’s’ – has been a ubiquitous part of highly individualised economies and social arrangements in recent decades, why would ‘community’ be the way to reform consequent problems with these economies and arrangements?

A rhetoric of publicness, on the other hand, may better carry the propositions of meaningful participation, decision-making, and civility required to reform economic and social arrangements, at the level of workplaces as well as in public policy. While ‘community’ assumes a given set of social relations, as the origin of future developments (see Linda T4), publicness names a necessary condition for bringing about social relations or associations, always requiring participatory decision and specific context – like the ‘unique institutional arrangements’ (2021, 16) Waters-Lynch and Duff discuss as needing to be tailored to a commons. If coworking that has ambitions to transform social relations around work returns us to older efforts to democratise work (Miller and Rose 2008, 184–193), to make it social not solely financial, then stepping back from the familiar populist sense of democratisation as egalitarianism, as ‘everyone’, as ‘ordinary people’, as ‘the community’ – already assumed – is recommended. ‘Community’ either leaves hyper-individualised ‘subjects of interest’ undisturbed, or it trades on a populist, grassroots, ‘up to us’ generality ill-suited to the ‘governance challenges’ identified by Waters-Lynch and Duff (2021, 13). The governance of a workplace commons will always require awareness and negotiation of social differences between sociable strangers, rather than presumption of a collective identity of the like-minded. Publicness is the continuous activity of making things public, ‘what is open for all or many to see or hear about’ (Thompson in Kavada and Poell 2021, 4) and this provides a practical basis for the cooperation out of which a collective identity can be made: mutual cooperation depends on the actions of the same actors over time and their actions being ‘made visible to others’ (Waters-Lynch and Duff 2021, 13). A story of publicness is better suited to necessary attention to institutional practices and arrangements than a story of community (Schudson 1997).

We have focused on the ways in which a rhetoric of community has not proved the communicative glue that could enrol sufficient people to make viable a coworking organisation located in a region of evident knowledge worker need for such a ‘third space’ and which promised a reformation of work and business to align with social, environmental, and governance concerns. In taking this focus, the argument is not that a rhetoric of community, or any other rhetoric, ‘constructs’ or is determinative of social relations of work (Hacking 1999). An obvious objection to our case study is that we needed look no further for The Hub’s failure to endure than the lack of financial capital. Had the Initiator raised enough capital or been supported by the council or a large corporate to secure permanent premises, surely there would be no need for a cultural explanation? But we are not arguing for a cultural explanation to trump the actuality of the missing financial capital,⁵ or any of the other elements involved in making coworking organisations, or alternatively impeding their establishment or success. Were the capital to have been raised, the fate of the other strategy – the making of a self-directed, grassroots organisation, it’s ‘up to us’ strategy; in other words, the attempt to achieve an organic coworking organisation that marries the interests of community and private enterprise – would still remain to be explained. Pointing to a lack of capital is not the same as explaining a failure to achieve the work of making the organisation into, in the vision of one participant (John, T2), a ‘community of businesses’, as a stable grouping with momentum and durability.⁶

When the cultural circuit of capital is roiled with contention about work and how it should be organised and governed, the utility and limitations of a rhetoric of community as a pervasive tool of persuasion needs a critical eye – not for whether it betrays ‘real’ community by substituting symbolic relations, but because it does not shift social relations beyond the hyper-individualism of financialised capitalism. If we are to understand better some of the challenges in developing sustainable urban futures – as part of more ambitious reforms and reimagining of economies – we have to listen to the voices of social actors on the ground and, as well as hearing a set of very real needs, attend to the ways their responses, interests, agency and decisions are shaped by available rhetorics and the materials they provide for making sense of their urban situations. If ‘community’ no longer guarantees the transformative or even reforming path out of current work arrangements, a democratising ‘publicness’ may provide a more modest story with which to work.

Ethics statement

Ethics Approval (CHEAN B 21074-09/17) for the study was granted by the College Human Ethics Advisory Network, College of Design and Social Context, RMIT University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Change Enabling Capability Platform, RMIT University [grant number (ECP 341279)].

Notes

1 A ‘B Corp’ is an organisation certified to ‘meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose.’ https://www.bcorporation.com.au/.

2 Up for consideration here is whether the kind of action remains primarily exchange in pursuit of respective individuals’ interests, or, for example, the decision-making on matters affecting the commons identified by Waters-Lynch and Duff (2021).

3 On stories as intersubjective sets of meanings and ‘many of the most important agents of history’ because they enable large-scale human cooperation, see Harari (2017, 168).

4 On the coincidence of the subject of interest with individuals’ contemporary formation as rational economic actors, see Foucault (2008, 273) on the emergence of the individual ‘as the source of interest’, as having interests that are held to be ‘a form of both immediately and absolutely subjective will’.

5 On the need for attention to cultural conditions in an organisation’s success without displacing the actuality of ‘the financial numbers’, see Froud et al. (2005, 22–23).

6 Here we are not looking for unity, agreeing with Thompson (1982) that an organisation is better understood as a dispersed social entity, but for stabilisation of new social relations between people as members of that entity.