Unfinished sympathy: on the limitations of sharing as a work practice in community-led coworking

Abstract

Collaborative workspaces are perceived as places of shared infrastructure where labour is organised in alternative ways. In our article, we juxtapose current and previous work and life arrangements of freelancers who had practised community-led coworking in the medium-sized city of Graz, Austria, asking them to reflect on their professional trajectories. We show that although community-led coworking initially provided an environment of resilience for the freelancers, impediments emerged related to their professional development over time. The latter, we argue, is due to the limitations of sharing as a work practice performed in community-led coworking spaces.

Keywords:

• collaborative workspaces
• community-led coworking
• freelance trajectories
• precariousness
• limitations of sharing
• geographies of work
• follow-up interviews

1. Introduction

Ten years ago, coworking was a relatively under-researched phenomenon, even though some scholars had already provided key insights (e.g., Spinuzzi, 2012; see; Pohler, 2012, for Austria). Since then, literature has highlighted coworking as a way of independently organising freelance and project-based work in the knowledge economy. Although one can trace coworking’s roots in older forms and modes of collaboration and/or sharing, most researchers situate its emergence in the mid-2000s’ (DeGuzman & Tang, 2011; Gandini, 2015). Moreover, coworking has been predominantly linked with large urban agglomerations (Avdikos & Merkel, 2020; Moriset, 2013), which has led to its characterisation as an urban phenomenon (Mariotti et al., 2021) linked to the social practices of contemporary urbanism (Merkel, 2015). In common conceptualisations of coworking spaces or collaborative workspaces (both hereinafter as CWS), urban freelancers may benefit from coworking early in their professional careers as they seek networking opportunities and combat the isolation of freelance employment (Merkel, 2019; Pacchi & Mariotti, 2021). Working in CWS is regarded as a “strategy for mitigating precarity” (de Peuter et al., 2017, p. 688) connected with freelance work (Reuschke et al., 2021) through finding new projects, being involved in learning processes that help acquire new knowledge, gaining access to resources, and lowering operational costs and professional risks through modes of sharing. The spatial proximity, from which all the aforementioned benefits emanate, is one of the main reasons why urban coworking and coworkers profit from economies of scale which develop in densely populated urban areas (Avdikos & Kalogeresis, 2018; Avdikos & Merkel, 2020; Brinks & Ibert, 2015).

Drawing on burgeoning literature mentioned above, scholarship clearly points to the multiple reasons and motives for freelancers and self-employed people to look for a working environment like a CWS during the early stages of their professional careers. What remains less clear, however, is the impact of CWS over a longitudinal time span, particularly for freelancers who leave their former CWS in favour of other labour¹ arrangements (e.g., waged labour and/or freelancing in other workplaces). This article focuses on community-led coworking spaces (CLCS) in the city of Graz² shedding light on the role of sharing as a social practice within early phases of coworkers’ professional trajectories. We draw on the literature of Avdikos and Iliopoulou (2019), Avdikos and Merkel (2020), and Avdikos and Pettas (2021) for a contextualisation of CLCS. They all describe CLCS as spaces of collaborative work, not exclusively limited to income-generating forms of labour but also linked to alternative or transformative economies (e.g., solidarity economy, commoning, cooperatives, bottom-up urbanism, “makers”, etc.). Therefore, they are often an important starting point for small self-employed entrepreneurs in rather precarious economic sectors (e.g., art and culture). In contrast to entrepreneurial-led coworking spaces, the organisation, maintenance, and reproduction of a CLCS is organised by a community. In this article, we concentrate on workers in the age range of mid-thirties to early forties (except one, see Table 1) who have gained experience with community-led coworking in the past. In our case study, the participants used to work in the same CLCS for a longer timespan than those in entrepreneurial-led spaces, who usually prefer a high degree of flexibility demanding short-term use (e.g., monthly subscriptions), as reflected in findings of Avdikos and Iliopoulou (2019). We juxtapose material gathered from one of the authors^a in his earlier work (2015/2016) with material collected by both authors at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2023. All interviewees’ current working and life arrangements diverge from their situations recorded in 2015/2016. From our data, we conclude that a) working in a community-led coworking space served as a means of nourishment and support in a phase of professional nascence and experimentation but, at a later phase, presented barriers to the interviewees’ career advancement, and b) even if community and belongingness were benefits at an early stage of coworking, interviewees confront limitations of sharing as a work practice. This brings us to the point that coworking in a community-led workspace as a way of organising work may be inconsistent with demands for resources asked by new professional and personal arrangements, highlighting the limitations of sharing as an inherent component of community-led coworking.

Table 1. Interviewees’ career paths and coworking roles (own table, 2023)

	job description		state of employment		coworking role		max. number of persons in the space
Year Coworker	2015/16	2021**	2015/16	2021**	2015/16	2021**	2015/16	2021**
Hannah* (~37, Interior Designer) [mother, partnered]	Exhibition and Textile Design	Interior Design	freelancer	salaried	host	exited	7 pax. (80 m^2)	— (maternity leave)
Leo* (45, Graphic Designer) [unknown]	Cultural and Event Management	Software Developer	freelancer	salaried	co-host/member	exited	10–15 pax. (270 m^2)	— (corporate office)
Caro* (~37, Architect) [partnered]	Bottom-/Pop-Up Urbanism	Sustainable Renovation	freelancer	salaried	host/member	exited	9 pax. (85 m^2)	— (corporate office)
Moritz* (40, Architect, [father, partnered]	Ecological Artist/Agent	Ecological Artist/Agent	freelancer	freelancer	member	exited	9 pax. (85 m^2)	— (home, remote)
Sophie* (~38, Graphic Designer, [mother, partnered]	Graphic and Editorial Designer	Illustrator and Corporate Designer	freelancer	freelancer	host/member	shared studio (relocated)	9 pax. (85 m^2)	4 pax. (100 m^2)
Klaus* (57, Law) [partnered]	Visual Artist	Visual Artist	freelancer	freelancer	host/member	shared studio (relocated)	5 pax. (100 m^2)	3 pax. (400 m^2)

*All interviewee names are pseudonyms. **Two of the follow-up interviews were conducted in early 2023 (Sophie and Klaus).

2. Conceptual framing

Given the growing number of studies dealing with precariousness, there is enough material to support that polysemy renders the concept fuzzy (Barbier, 2022³; Dörre (2014), leaving the work of theorising precariousness an open question (Strauss, 2018). Precariousness is a concept increasingly related to workers’ agency and how the latter is forged (Coe & Jordhus-Lier, 2011; Strauss, 2020). Castree (2007, p. 853) suggests that research should focus on “examin[ing] working peoples” lives holistically; the reason is that the employment aspect cannot be seen separately from the reproductive sphere as the overarching question is “how people live and seek to live” (ibid., p. 859). In that sense, we approach precariousness as a relational phenomenon not contained to labour conditions (e.g., Campbell & Price, 2016; Kalleberg, 2009), but to be explored within broader life arrangements (Motakef, 2019). Moreover, it is understood as related to “income, work and general financial situation, gender arrangements, social security, care arrangements, children’s development, self-care, health and social integration” (Klenner et al., 2012, p. 219, cited in Motakef, 2019, p. 160). We are particularly interested in how precariousness driven from insecurity at work diffuses into and challenges personal life arrangements (e.g., the family sphere).

This article does not scrutinise precarious labour per se but sheds light on the ways in which precariousness related to uncertainties around work, as one form of precariousness among others, challenges numerous equilibria within one’s life. From a feminist perspective, labour markets and households are distinct, yet closely interrelated fields, forming a “family-market nexus” (Clement et al., 2009, p. 241). Since our work deals with (ex-)freelancers, we follow Armano and Murgia (2017), who support that freelancers’ work primarily consists of unremunerated, immaterial work that takes place within a dense network of contacts. This in turn has led to a reterritorialisation of work from the workspace as the traditional, physically bounded, and regulated space, to an intermediate space between the workplace and the personal space. Following the above, we focus on how a community may alter the coworkers’ personal working and living arrangements, pushing them to re-evaluate their agency and socio-spatially shift their future ways of working.

Particular consideration is given to the social practice of sharing as a foundational component of the so-called “coworking community”, and to how the boundaries of the former may impose constraints on the latter. Given its connection to the notion of community, coworking is closely linked to trends and concepts such as the sharing economy⁴ and collaborative consumption (Arvidsson, 2018; Bouncken & Reuschl, 2018; Durante & Turvani, 2018; Gandini, 2015; Hall & Ince, 2018). Moreover, CLCS are exposed to a special tension as they constantly oscillate between the commons and the market (Avdikos & Pettas, 2021; Bauwens & Pantazis, 2018; Dobusch, 2019; Waters-Lynch & Duff, 2021) referring to a shift in the organisation of work between processes of economic valorisation and social transformation. We follow the three modes of sharing in Widlok’s work, who describes sharing as “a complex phenomenon that is based on a combination of constituent practices to do with communication, relatedness, and bodily presence” (2013, p. 27). In the methodology, analysis, and discussion sections of this article, we explain why we couple these modes of sharing with the three elements that compose a practice, namely “material, competence and meaning” (Shove et al., 2012, p. 22 f., 29 f.). Exploring how and to what extent boundaries arise in practices of shared work, we follow Kennedy’s (2016) narrative of sharing and John’s (2013) work on the logics of sharing. Kennedy discerns “sharing as an economy driven by social capital; […] as a mode of scaled distribution; and […] as a site of social intensification” (2016, p. 461). John (2013, p. 121; John, 2017, p. 10, 19, 85 f.) explores sharing as a) an act of distribution to save money out of economic difficulties and b) as an act of communication to preserve one’s (private/familial) environment. Both authors suggest that sharing is always a communicative practice that implicates inclusion and exclusion, stressing values such as openness and mutuality, often propagated by the “digital commons” but nearly impossible to fulfil because of onerous hours of (both paid and unpaid) work and exhaustion (Schor, 2014, p. 196; see also Gatsinos & Höfner, in press). In line with Wittel who argues that sharing both “[…] (material things as well as immaterial things such as thoughts or affects) [leads] to an intensification of social interaction” (2011, p. 5), we are attentive to the fact that sustaining “the social” through sharing immaterial resources might not be achieved because demanding reciprocation for sharing immaterial resources is implicit, and thus difficult to address (see also Kennedy, 2016).

Moreover, sharing is considered an essential component of a network culture and therefore, a critical view of CLCS should be more attentive to the five coworkings’ alleged core values (namely “community, collaboration, openness, diversity, and sustainability”, Merkel, 2015, p. 124). By linking Wittel’s (2011) work on the “qualities of sharing” with work on sociality networks and project-based work well-known in debates of cultural and creative industries (CCIs) (Grabher, 2002; Grabher & Ibert, 2006; Granovetter, 2005), we extend the coworking elements of “convenience sharing” and “community building” outlined by Capdevila (2014) to include the constraints of employment biographies of freelancers who attempted to professionalise themselves through initial “nesting” (Brinks, 2012) and “cocooning” (Servaty et al., 2018). The theoretical perspectives on practices of sharing help assess the importance of community in CWS as providing potentials for and/or imposing impediments to coping with precarious prospects of self-employment.

3. Methodology: following-up labour arrangements of former coworkers

For the purposes of this article, we followed the professional and life trajectories of former coworkers. We collected material from two different time periods. This includes six coworkers interviewed during the author^a’s past research in 2015/2016⁵ but who have since left their former workspace⁶ (see Table 1). By the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2023, we contacted the same participants for a follow-up interview⁷ about their career changes and reasons why they no longer work in their former CLCS. In 2015/2016, the initial participants were selected via “snowballing” (Mattissek et al., 2013, p. 189) along an already existing contact of the author^a, namely Caro⁸, who was using a desk at “Creation Mill”,⁹ “opening the gate”¹⁰ to author^a. An important part of the interviews was dedicated to self-reflecting on professional work and life alterations. It is not a comparison of two identical examinations from two different periods but rather an approach enabling the interviewees to describe their professional changes in retrospect. According to a social practice approach, we substantiate this temporal juxtaposition on the fact that “[a]rrangements of time and place are structured by past practices and are themselves relevant in structuring future pathways of development and/or diffusion” (Shove et al., 2012, p. 134). Our material thus consists of 12 qualitative 30–90-minute interviews conducted in two different periods with the six participants. To highlight the biographies of our coworkers and their different geographies of work, as well as their understanding of community, we followed both former hosts and members of CLCS (see Table 1). In the sample, we included both individuals who remained self-employed and ex-coworkers who are now salaried. We did not aim for representativeness but for implications that help understand how the professional life of coworkers who initially chose “community” as their way of working may change within their careers. At the time of writing, the participants are between 36 and 57 years old, all have a university degree, and three of them gave up self-employment since the previous interview and are now salaried workers (see Table 1). Hannah, Moritz, and Sophie have also started families (i.e., children) in the meantime (see Table 1).

We analysed the material with qualitative content analysis following Mayring (2002). Supported by MAXQDA, open coding was applied to create analytical categories of our core understandings of sharing and precariousness on the one hand, and the personal work situation of our coworkers on the other. For further analysis, the sample from 2015/2016 was re-analysed with the codes created in 2021 to reveal possible contradictions or patterns with past viewpoints of the coworkers. Exploring our material, we followed Höfner and Saltiel (2021) to exchange perspectives of both authors. The added value of this collaborative form of data analysis lies in a multiple filtering-down process of shared knowledge production and increases reliability in the evaluation process. The filtering-down consisted of a dual procedure, in which the codes were first commented on by author^a after the open coding. Subsequently, these comments were provided with new questions or comments on understanding by author^b concerning topic-related issues or current knowledge gaps. A follow-up dialogue was conducted among both authors to consolidating the analysed material.

4. The paradox of resilience and stagnation

In our work, we examine the role that working in a CLCS may have on how sharing is practised and how it relates to specific phases of freelance work and personal life. We shed light on the practices of sharing within a CLCS towards nurturing a young freelancer’s professional advancement. Referring to “young freelancers”, we followed coworkers who, in 2015/2016, were at an early stage of their professional life (not quite established in the market) and not yet stressed by obligations drawing on their resources (e.g., time, caring, and finance). In this segment, we portray the “paradox of resilience and stagnation” that characterises modes of sharing in CLCS. Initially, we observe that practising coworking in a community has the potential to serve as a tool for young freelancers trying “to get a foot in the door” of the labour market (Merkel, 2019, p. 532), providing them with access to infrastructure and networking opportunities, as well as with soft skills that are needed to progress professionally. The paradox occurs, our results demonstrate, when, at a certain phase of freelancing in a community, community-led coworking imposes limitations on how sharing is practised within a community. Our interviewees expressed that they felt exhausted from increased responsibilities related to a) taking care of the CLCS, its reproduction and/or b) personal life situations (e.g., raising a family), coupled with a need for professional consolidation. During the last wave of interviews (2021 and 2023), they showed that they had to reduce sharing practices in which they were previously involved. Advancing the argument that CWS do not function as “springboards” for one’s professional career (Pacchi & Mariotti, 2021) but rather as “mutual survival platforms of precarious employment” (Avdikos & Merkel, 2020, p. 349), we identify that, after a certain period and alongside private life alterations, coworkers encounter the risks of professional stagnation when working in a community.

4.1. Community in coworking foreshadowing employability

A prevalent category of coworkers comprises young freelancers who practise coworking as they try to enter the labour market. This was the case for five out of six interviewees in our sample. Everyone enjoyed the serendipitous production processes (Moriset, 2013) in a shared working environment back in 2015/2016; coworkers in a flourishing coworking scene bred in the neighbourhood of Lend in Graz,¹¹ jointly developed an atmosphere of conviviality that was crucial for coworking at the time:

We just walked into the neighbourhood or met for lunch to make a deal for collaborating on projects. This means, the whole Lend is actually a coworking space. (Leo, 2016, 05:53)

Spatial proximity between coworkers facilitated frequent day-to-day encounters in the district of Lend, leading to joint projects and collaborations emerged organically from out-of-work contexts, as Leo said in comfort:

Working at home is not possible at all, own inspiration and joint projects are just more fun when you sit together and drink coffee together and tinker around […] there’s a reason why they’re here [referring to the local Coworking Spaces] in this neighbourhood. (Leo, 2016, 05:31)

Coworkers got to know each other and collaborations between networks were considered as easy to build. “Unconstrained” experimentation resulted in the development of bigger projects; nevertheless, this form of experimentation should not be conceived as restricted to the sharing of infrastructure; sharing tacit knowledge, ideas and inspiration on spontaneous occasions was another main pillar of innovation, as Moritz revealed when speaking enthusiastically about his strong attachment to the place:

[…] we share the infrastructure, the rent, the meeting room, and the kitchen and so on but also the thoughts. And that’s why some things have happened or come into being here that no one would have thought possible before entering the space. (Moritz, 2015, 08:43)

Even more importantly, these processes of sharing knowledge, ideas and infrastructure were taking place within a certain form of expressed idealism; trying “interesting things” out in view of “changing something” would be more important than making ends meet (Caro, 2021, 49:22) and working without knowing whether the effort would in turn be financially compensated was not something oft considered (Moritz, 2015, 15:31, at that time aged 33). This resulted in a dense network of contacts in which coworkers were being “advertised” via taking part not only in (professional) collaborative projects, but also in curating informal occasions, reproducing the eighbourhood’s flair, such as the Lendwirbel festival, in which all interviewees had voluntarily taken part, revealing the potential of sharing practices that help “build[s] solidarity through place-based connections between peers” (Sharp, 2020, p. 262). The fact that the coworkers were known for what they were doing led them to a better employability; a “reputation business” (Grabher, 2002 f.; Watson, 2012), as we observed with Caro and Sophie, who both described the benefits of being part of a relatively small job community in their sector, and who have become local experts for a certain niche:

You know what the others are doing. I actually never had to apply for a job in Graz. I was more or less advertised from one job to the next. (Caro, 2021, 13:32)

[…]. A great network of people. It was not limited to age and not to profession, it was great. […]. So I guess it was also being there and acting in this many ways, it was … I didn’t search for clients, they came. It happened. […]. (Sophie, 2023, 17:13)

In addition, not only did coworkers benefit from shared infrastructure and taking part in networking processes, but they also developed soft skills that proved to be significant for their professional development. Referring to social practice theory, “the significance of communities and networks as crucibles in which new arrangements are formed, as containers that limit their diffusion and as conduits through which they flow” (Shove et al., 2012, p. 66), the previous examples show how important the community was for gaining knowledge via a network that could be more difficult to access otherwise. For example, Caro benefited from having to communicate with several different actors, which in turn made her knowledgeable in group dynamics, and able to interact efficiently with different stakeholders, a skill useful in her current role as a waged labourer. Similarly, Leo, who had worked and co-hosted a CWS for many years, and benefited from knowledge transfer-networks, developed skills such as being able to concentrate in shared offices with a lot of colleagues and being adaptable to different working contexts. Hannah mentions that, because of her experience as a host, she has gained “an investment in a second education” (Hannah, 2021, 11:44), giving her a self-confidence to approach people in various social interactions in the context of her waged work, a skill highly appreciated by her current employer. Here, we again see the value of following coworkers over time because it helps decipher the meaning and relationship of the past and the future by practising sharing in a community: “[…] the past is not the beginning of a fixed course of action, but rather a kind of training run that enables people to gain experience […], as well as to build competence about successful or appropriate responses to sharing on demand. […]. The future plays a role in sharing mainly in the form of confidence, especially the confidence to get access to goods also in the future through sharing […]” (Widlok, 2019, p. 164, own translation). We show how individual “competence” (Shove et al., 2012) was built by a community that, in a certain time, created a “meaning” (ibid.) through “bodily copresence” (Widlok, 2013) of the coworkers in a space that was crucial for providing shared values within non-standardised employment patterns.

4.2. Community in coworking impeding professional development

In contrast to the positive connotations of working in a community for a young freelancer, a retrospective view also reveals that, at some certain phase of professional and personal change, coworkers needed to leave their former space and community. As years went by and as personal and professional needs evolved, the interviewees had to adapt their working arrangements. This is reflected by Leo’s rather cautious stance regarding local community and coworking compared to the one he had in 2016:

There are still a few [idealists] but of course it’s more difficult in an environment where you want to safeguard yourself financially or want to feed your family somehow and have a certain degree of security. […] most of them [referring to freelancers] break in [collapse] at 40 all around. And say, I have to come up with something now. Either I get hired [salaried] somewhere or my thing [business] gets bigger and [I] put it on several shoulders. (Leo, 2021, 17:41)

Here, we identify a certain period in a worker’s life in which the equilibrium between personal and professional relations must be rearranged. Working long-hours is inherent to freelance work (Avdikos & Kalogeresis, 2018; Papageorgiou, 2020), marked as “irregular, insecure, and unprotected” in the creative industries (Hesmondhalgh, 2008, p. 563). Therefore, a self-employed person who has not yet reached the level of “professional adulthood” (Avdikos & Iliopoulou, 2019, p. 121) and/or has not yet progressed enough to financially benefit from the exploitation of hired labour, may find it difficult to cope with long working hours by their early 40s’. Of course, this is neither something new nor something specific for coworking per se – it applies for cultural work in general (Gill & Pratt, 2008). What is new, though, is the observation that sharing practices inherent to community-led coworking may entail limitations which, unless addressed, might bring freelancers to more risks, enhancing their vulnerability rather than protecting them. Three of our freelancers who wanted to stay self-employed had to be more focussed in their work instead of spending their resources on time-demanding sharing practices. This focus was not possible in the former space as Sophie stated, feeling distracted, surrounded by too many coworkers – although she liked them all:

Maybe I wished for a little bit more silence around me. […]. And less irritations (sighs)… I had a lot of them. I had a lot of interactions, […], I wanted less […]. (Sophie, 2023, 07:53)

The scarcity of personal resources (e.g., time), we argue, challenges the compatibility of work with other obligations both in the workplace (having to curate and maintain the CLCS) and in the private sphere (e.g., leading to struggles regarding family planning). Assuming that an individual’s personal and family aspirations significantly shape their decisions about future working arrangements, we observe that the interviewees have shifted their work towards more secure and less exhausting forms of employment schemes over time. More specifically, half of them changed their self-employment status in favour of waged labour, like in the case of Caro, for whom waged labour provided her with stable income and health insurance, as well as regular working hours. Besides moving to waged labour and its associated safety net in comparison to freelance work, she also was relieved from the burden of having to take care of the CLCS. For her (Caro, 2021, 49:22), coworking demanded more energy than she could afford, as she shifted from always being motivated for change to being satisfied with “just” doing nothing after work. For the coworkers who still wanted to stay self-employed, spatial arrangements of work needed to be changed to focus on the demands of freelancing. Sophie and Klaus decided to share less (of the social activities practised in the past), opening their own studios and exclusively self-selecting new members. In some of the cases where family played a role (e.g., Moritz), work alteration was supported and sustained by other resources made available externally (e.g., childcare outsourced to relatives) to cushion precariousness allowing him to continue working in art and culture in the way he desired (Moritz, 2021, 43:09). The aforementioned corroborate findings that freelancing needs to be sustained by interpersonal relationships, something that gives the locus of knowledge work a relational dimension (Armano & Murgia, 2017). Our coworkers, we argue, needed to regulate the degree of their engagement in these relationships to deal with increasing time demands imposed by personal and professional development goals. Regulation in these cases meant reducing the degree of sharing with their coworkers (see also Sophie, 2023, 27:17, now being a mother). Here, the relational character of workers’ agency and the need to explore it not solely in the workplace and the labour market, but also against the backdrop of social reproduction (Castree, 2007), is highly visible.

The average age of CWS’ users (36 years, see Deskmag, 2019) resonates with Leo’s reflections, who, in his late-thirties in 2016, stated that the positive atmosphere and the informality built around coworking is the basis for developing collaborations and joint projects (see Grabher, 2002; Grabher & Ibert, 2006). However, in 2021 (being 44) he stated that once a freelancer gets in their 40s’, they should either have developed a massive portfolio or shifted towards waged labour, as working long-hours can become unbearable. Conducting follow-up interviews with (ex)coworkers, we argue that this deviation is not contradictory, it rather shows an alteration in personal life preferences or needs that shape professional decisions. When instabilities increase and exhaustion soars, Caro expresses the need to make a decision that substantially transforms her professional and private life. This decision is either based on professional reasons:

I just get money in my bank account every month. It’s great! (laughs) I really don’t wanna miss it anymore. (Caro, 2021, 41:30)

and/or on family reasons (see Hannah, 2021, 35:33; 36:59, Sophie 2023, 27:17; 02:19 part 2), meaning that they are not bound to obligations like sharing and caring for a work-related community any longer.

On the one hand, community helps many in their start-up phase by providing a “protected” space (e.g., to experiment in a “nest”). On the other hand, this location, which is constituted by the community, also harbours the risk of sustaining a feeling of safety and security since positive emotions are associated with being bonded to the community (see the three modes of sharing by Widlok, 2013). These can become deceptive because the feeling of one’s own security is maintained through senses of belongingness without achieving economic autonomy. These observations are in line with what Resch et al. call the “painful pleasure of fitting in” (2021, p. 799 f.), stemming from a contradiction between a feeling of belonging to a close-knit community and becoming exhausted from personal sharing in “pursuit of belonging”. In the same vein, Wright et al. (2022) contend that, even if coworkers initially join a CWS to cope with their precarious conditions, performing social support for peers may lead them to challenges, exploitation and enhanced precariousness. In our cases, this is mirrored in the exhaustive character of sharing within a community (Gatsinos & Höfner, in press). This is why we think working with follow-up interviews is of high value, since Sophie was anticipating something different, when entering her first CLCS:

[…] I was there [Creation Mill] and it turned out that I just stayed there because I wanted to be freer anyway and because I also wanted to escape a bit from this bird’s nest¹² in which I was sitting. And I liked it here. (Sophie, 2015, 10)

We observe then that being “protected” by the “senses of community” (SOC, c.f. Garrett et al., 2017) in CLCS, otherwise being exhausted by performing social support (Wright et al., 2022) in “pursuit of belonging” (Resch et al., 2021, p. 799 f.), may impede one’s own professional development, causing stagnation¹³ in the long term. In our cases, this is due to the aforementioned “nesting” that accommodates one’s own status that emerged through elements of “material”, “competence”, and “meaning” (Shove et al., 2012) and was provided by the people at Creation Mill. The emotional belongingness generates a feeling of apparent security in many cases (except for Moritz and Klaus). This sense of community is linked to a phase of “unconstrained” experimentation, as described by Caro, who “had to” host Creation Mill on a “volunteer” basis for a while:

It seems to me that Graz was somehow a test phase in my life. […]. A bit of an unconstrained phase, where you test and try things out and learn. And now in Vienna I’m actually […] in a serious project, where it’s really about something. (Caro, 2021, 17:04)

As our coworkers got older, their alleged sense of security became more fragile. They realised the need to prioritise their own life realities in relation to their everyday environment (friends, family, society, retirement provisions, etc.). The perception of their own precariousness thus seems to be constituted by their own position in relation to the prevailing picture of society. Consequently, with increasing age, structural pressure arose to alter the experimental phase of working in a community, since the burdens related to sharing and caring in a community are specific for CLCS and not for freelance work in general.

5. Discussion: on the limitations of sharing in community-led coworking

In the previous section, we depicted how sharing in a CLCS evolved from a process of accessing and providing both material and immaterial resources, to a work setting with possible constraints. As our results show, the culture of sharing, described as the basis of coworking ten years ago (Brinks, 2012; Spinuzzi, 2012), reached certain limitations for our interviewees’ everyday working practices. Contesting CWS as places that help nurture professional development through sharing material and immaterial resources, our research reveals that sharing practised within community-led coworking spaces may entail limitations that emerge over time. This is not to say that these limitations emerge only in the long-run; on the contrary, they existed already at the time of joining a CLCS. However, we found that these limitations were often explicitly understood as such only after a certain period, in which coworkers’ professional and personal trajectories changed; now they faced the necessity to grow professionally and to provide more of their resources to spheres other than work. As Wittel (2011, p. 5) stated and our interviewees highlight, there is at first little doubt that “the sharing of material things produces the social (as a consequence)” but following Kennedy (2016, p. 461 f.), our cases retrospectively amplify the argument that “the resources to make the sharing social […] are finite”; in the CLCS we explored, coworkers could not afford to share without limits.

Taking into account examples of “co-production” (Richardson, 2016), “co-discipline” (Blagoev et al., 2019) and “co-constructing a SOC” (c.f. Garrett et al., 2017), that are often positively associated with developing a community, we see how sharing led to a sustaining emotional bond with the CLCS. This is very well illustrated by Sophie, who rather decided to change herself and not the “system” of the CLCS:

[…] I very much liked the concept of Creation Mill. So, I didn’t want it to change. I didn’t want to say […] let us higher [raise] the Miete [German for ‘rent’] for everybody and let’s reduce the … [members]. […]. So I didn’t want to change it [Creation Mill]. But I never went that way to talk with them, no, I didn’t. (Sophie, 2023, 10:54)

This highlights that, even when structures became “painful” to her, she did not want to address the downsides of the CLCS because she knew the emotions and care work it took to establish and sustain a community she once aspired to and indeed helped build. Rather, she preferred to open her own studio, in which she has greater “control” over the levels of sharing she engages in. Her relation to something she loved (i.e., community building at Creation Mill) has changed because of the burdens imposed by the reproduction of the CLCS (e.g., practices of sharing, like curating and caring). For the interviewees, time emerges as a precious resource, and its finite character is seen as an obstacle towards intensive involvement in sharing practices (see also Johns & Hall, 2020). The formerly hoped-for “sympathy” of working in a community (see Sophie, 2015, 10 and Moritz, 2015, 8:43) is in some way left “unfinished”. The temporal aspect of practices shows how arrangements of a certain period shape future developments and reveals the role of different modes of sharing. This becomes retrospectively evident through the role of the individual coworkers in their community, which has made work more meaningful precisely because of communal activities (Simonelli et al., 2018). The latter, however, have imposed limitations on maturing professionally, which is why they have led to spatial transformations of the coworking community. Social relationships that were once intensively cultivated have now been reconstituted or even dissolved, as our cases demonstrate. This is revealed by Klaus, who, referring to the people with whom he used to share a coworking space in the past (2015), later states:

[…] The woman who did the travel agency, we lost sight of her. We met her accidentally, she still does the same thing. Hmm … who else was in there? Oh, yeah! And a graphic designer … No, we haven’t seen him again, no. (Klaus, 2023, 25:32)

Jakonen et al. (2017) discuss that precarious coworkers may not engage in relation-building processes, preferring to focus on their work instead. They argue that coworkers cannot afford the time to participate in “buzzing” (ibid., p. 240) that develops within the CWS’ broader milieus. While we did not identify the coworkers refraining from participation in collaborative processes (especially at the beginning of their coworking time), we observed that they gradually distanced themselves from their former desk mates, highlighting the finite character of sharing practised in a community. This ostensible contradiction may reveal the shortcomings of the community-led coworking practice for one’s professional development in the long run. Furthermore, the atmosphere that initially helped coworkers establish a “reputation business” (Grabher, 2002, p. 208 f.) seems to have turned into an impediment, especially in a medium-sized city with a relatively small but dense network of CCIs:

You are a certain person; you do something, and you have the stamp that you do exactly that. […]. I find that difficult in Graz. When you’ve been in a community for so long and so strongly. (Caro, 2021, 14:23)

This is also exacerbated by the self-selection processes in CLCS. As confirmed by Moritz (2015, 26:46), Klaus (2023, 16:18) and Sophie (2023, 20:54), the choice of new coworkers is such that it often reflects one’s own bubble. Temporary events from bottom-up activities (see high level of involvement in organising the Lendwirbel festival) thereby reinforced the trust-building and learning component of communities through emotionally-shared experiences (Richardson, 2016; Wenger, 1998) on the one hand, but labelled the coworkers in such a way that they lost control of their self-determination as freelancers on the other.

Referring to the “conceptual boundaries of sharing” (Kennedy, 2016), we make use of the “sharing in” and “sharing out”, viewing sharing as a social act of inclusion through community. In our case, “sharing in” is evident by “granting access to flows of objects, their intrinsic goods, and their intrinsic value” (Widlok, 2013, p. 28), such as the high identification of our coworkers with the local neighbourhood in Graz at the beginning of their coworking phase. They settled into their “nest” and successively gained ties in a dense network. “sharing out”, on the other hand, does not necessarily generate socially significant connections because it only provides material infrastructure in the sense of access and transfer, namely distributing resources from one to the other (ibid.). Kennedy (2016) explains the risk for social relations not to be sustained through practices of sharing immaterial resources by the fact that, unlike the provision of material resources, they do not explicitly demand reciprocation. However, it can still be asked implicitly when “being there” (Merkel, 2015, p. 128, see also Sophie, 2023, 17:13). Then, basal modes of sharing (e.g., “communication, relatedness and bodily presence”, see Widlok, 2013, p. 27) are repeatedly characterised as a form of collaborative consumption that is described as feminine, as we have seen it with Sophie:

[…] the position I had in Creation Mill, being a little bit the Mama [referring to being the host/curator of the space]. (Sophie, 2023, 27:46)

Belk (2010), John (2013, 2017), and Kennedy (2016) use terms such as “mothering” and “mutuality” when no reciprocation is expected (e.g., breastfeeding, caring). Sophie now addresses the incompatibility of having to care for the family in parallel to curating and caring for a CLCS, which highlights that a community must be reproduced to provide all the assets it offers and hence just “being there’ is not enough’ (Merkel, 2015, p. 128):

I remember […] when I entered [Creation Mill], I guess 20 min. I was in the kitchen in the morning. Then there was ‘jour fixe’,¹⁴ […]. It was in the evening. Often it was two until four hours. Especially when we discussed something very hard. Yea, there were things to do. I mean, I tried to reduce it anyway but I tried to hold it a little bit down. (Sophie, 2023, 29:03)

Sophie compares the space’s care work (e.g., cleaning, kitchen, curating the display) with the social dynamics of “[…] a shared apartment [where the coworkers] [we] have similar problems” (Sophie, 2015, 34). In one case, precarious working conditions were cushioned by starting a waged labour position after maternity leave (Hannah), and in the case of Moritz (who remained self-employed being a father), care work is distributed on several shoulders within close relatives. This resonates with the “grey zone’ at the interface of work and home’ (Pulignano & Morgan, 2023, p. 259), which points to how households adapt to their members’ insecure employment status, providing them with unpaid, family work. For professionally advanced persons like Klaus, sharing less is even perceived as something to strive for:

There could be more [referring to the only two people who currently share a huge space of 400 m²] of course if they would have a different attitude but we can somehow now afford it, because I am in a stable position, and it is cool to have three and not more. (Klaus, 2023, 07:50)

The limitations of sharing, highlighted by this statement, are further substantiated by his following quote in which he explained the need for (occasional) sharing because of economic threats (see also Sophie), which led him to seek coworkers merely for splitting running costs to more people, dividing the space for scaling up the infrastructure (more desks):

Griesplatz [location of the old CWS in 2015] was nice, it was 100 m², this is 400 [referring to the current]. But there [the old one] we were not in such a stable financial situation […] there was 2, and we ended up being 4 or 5 people just to share the cost […]. (Klaus, 2023, 07:50)

As expressed above, Klaus reveals how the degree of sharing can change over time and thus the prefix “co” in coworking portrays different levels of social involvement within a community that might entail internal contradictions (Ivaldi et al., 2022). Following Wittel (2011) who conceives sharing as an investment, we witnessed Sophie and Klaus (still self-employed) decreasing their engagement in communal activities in favour of professional tasks. Leaving their former community, opening their own (shared) studios, shows that “[n]obody can share everything with everybody. […] we have to think carefully with whom we share and what we share” (ibid., p. 7).

However, all interviewees have adopted certain work practices from the coworking period, regardless of their current work status. Today, Caro and Leo (both employed) see themselves in a position to work more autonomously in a corporate context because of their experience of practising community, confirming the positive effects sharing can have on one’s future when performed in a “community of practice”¹⁵ (Widlok, 2019). They notice this when comparing themselves with current colleagues, who usually find it more difficult to take things into their own hands regarding organisational issues at work.

6. Conclusion

CLCS are linked to values such as openness and affordable accessibility since they aim to accommodate mostly precarious freelancers’ needs (Merkel, 2015, 2019). Adopting theoretical standpoints of sharing, we uncovered a paradox of resilience and stagnation of self-employed people in CLCS. Referring to the “logics of sharing” (John, 2013), our results showed that sharing as a communicative practice may entail limitations within communities of collaborative work. We demonstrated that demands associated with elements of sharing may impede professional advancement in community-led coworking spaces. We identified a gap between an initially sought after “unconstrained” experimentation in a community-led coworking space and tensions stemming from obligations related to reproductive work within a community. Distinct from waged labourers, freelancers face the constant challenge of having to craft and maintain a demand for their products or services. In response to this challenge, at first, CLCS seemed successful for early-stage freelancers, providing them with support and an alleged protection – through communal activities – when “nesting”. First, we found this when local networks and neighbourhood activities, important collaborations (both professional and non-professional), or new job opportunities were built through community-led coworking. Second, as coworkers who are no longer self-employed (three out of six) emphasised from today’s perspective, working within a community enabled them to manoeuvre confidently in the labour market. They appreciated the experience of working in a community, perceived it as valuable, and recommended community-led coworking as a “career learning phase”. Thus, a certain degree of professional advancement developed within the CLCS which aids their current work practices. Deepening our analysis, we discerned that participants would have faced the risk of stagnation if they stayed in a CLCS beyond an initial professionalisation phase (“nesting”). Hence, the longer the coworkers remained “nested” with a rather stagnant job performance, the more they would risk being dependent on “nesting”. The paradox of resilience and stagnation is only revealed in retrospect, highlighting the methodological relevance of conducting follow-up interviews.

Our work illuminates the transitions of former freelancers and their relation to community-led coworking through space and time. Notwithstanding, the interviewees showed that community-led coworking in a medium-sized city (as a specific form of coworking and practice of sharing) is characterised by certain ambivalences. Coworkers’ abilities to share without a demand for reciprocation become limited by private obligations as well as by the demands of a freelance labour market that are imposed over time. Referring to sharing as a substitute for professional advancement, we conclude that working in community imposed limitations, best demonstrated by the paradox of resilience and stagnation.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all (ex-)coworkers for their hospitality and willingness to share such exciting insights about their working lives, and the fruitful conversations. Further thanks are due to the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism, which significantly improved our work, the editor and to our colleague Heide K. Bruckner (native speaker) for proofreading. The authors acknowledge the financial support by the University of Graz.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Horizon 2020 [955907]; Amt der Steiermärkischen Landesregierung [ABT08-121270/2017-14].

Notes on contributors

Malte Höfner

Malte Höfner is a PhD candidate at the Department of Geography and Regional Science at the University of Graz, Austria. He studied Geography and Sustainable Urban and Regional Development. In his PhD project ‘Raumteilen’ (Sharing Spaces), he explores socio-spatial effects of sharing and dividing in everyday spheres of work, housing, and public life of urban societies.

Nikos Gatsinos

Nikos Gatsinos is a MSCA fellow and PhD candidate at the Department of Geography and Regional Science at the University of Graz, Austria. His previous studies were on Sociology and Social and Solidarity Economy. In his PhD research within CORAL-ITN, he explores the multiple dimensions of precariousness and how it is negotiated through material and immaterial forms of collaborative work, focusing on the rural.

Notes

1. Although we are familiar with the discourse about the diversity of work (e.g., Gibson-Graham, 2008), in this text the terms “labour” and “work” are used interchangeably. For a debate in coworking, see Gatsinos and Höfner (in press).

2. The medium-sized city of Graz with almost 300,000 inhabitants is Austria’s second-largest city, and since its nomination as the “European Capital of Culture” in 2003, it has boasted a number of cultural institutions and annual festivals of regional and international importance, ranging from an established art scene to cultural events (e.g., Creative Industries Styria, Steirischer Herbst, Diagonale Film Festival, Elevate, Spring Festival, La Strada, Lendwirbel, etc.).

3. Barbier shows how the French notion of “précarité”, originally deriving from philosophy and literature, ended up mistranslated into a neologism in English (“precarity”), which is now “able to grasp almost any meaning” (2022, p. 14).

4. The search of what “the” sharing economy is, is not yet very effective. See Hall and Ince (2018) for common misunderstandings with the term “Sharing Economy” – not necessarily bound to economic actors – within collaborative workspaces.

5. The 2015/2016 sample also included participant observation, since author^a has spent three weeks working in the community of Creation Mill (see footnote 9 below).

6. The COVID-19 pandemic, which took place in between the two periods of gathering material, is not considered as our participants’ work and life arrangements were already altered before the pandemic.

7. Four of the six interviews have been conducted and transcribed into German, two into English. A first commenting and translation to English has been conducted by author^a (native speaker).

8. One of the former Coworking hosts. All participants have received pseudonyms (see Table 1).

9. Pseudonym for a local CLCS with up to nine desks in one room of 85m², shared by our interviewees Caro, Moritz, and Sophie in 2015/2016. It is a non-for-profit space that claims “self-initiative” and “active participation” rather than just the “consumption” of cheap desks (mission statement Creation Mill).

10. Access to the field is often established through a “gatekeeper”, a key person who introduces the researcher(s) to others (Mattissek et al., 2013 , p. 153, 189 f.).

11. For many, the coworking scene in Graz highly relied on finding vacant spaces through networking as well as luck, as Klaus, Leo and Caro told us. The latter two were also involved in revitalising vacant real estate for cultural purposes. Graz is considered a city that offers plenty of vacant spaces (derGrazer, 2018 ; Zoidl, 2021).

12. A statement Sophie used for describing the reason to leave her very first CWS – not a CLCS (before arriving at Creation Mill). Today, relocated in her own shared studio, she said the same about Creation Mill.

13. This is not to say that coworkers fell into a state of passivity or inactivity. According to the Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries (2023), “stagnation” refers to “the fact of no longer developing or making progress”. In the case of our coworkers, they remained active, but their development was at stake nonetheless.

14. A “jour fixe” is a regularly recurring appointment in a small group of people, comparable to a plenum, in which issues important for the community are decided together (and in the past of Creation Mill often in grassroots, democratic ways).

15. Wenger (1998) theorises the concept of “communities of practice” under the assumption that shared engagement and participation is a fundamental process in social practice through which we learn. As a result, his concept encompasses learning as a process of social participation.