Co-working Spaces, Collaborative Practices and Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Collaborative work practices are being transformed through the growth of co-working in urban third spaces, makerspaces, fab labs, incubators, accelerators and digital labs. This paper is based on a 2-year project carried out by a network of academics and practitioners interested in new work practices in the collaborative economy, focusing particularly on collaborative workspaces. We concentrate on the relationships between collaboration and these new work practices according to three levels, individual, community and societal, highlighting their spatial and temporal dimensions. Our results indicate that: boundaries between waged employment and entrepreneurship are not rigid; individuals not only suffer from stress in traditional organisations but also of boredom; new collaborative practices imply rethinking their own competences and prospects, often leading to fundamental life changes; co-working communities can provide collective meaning, crucial to supporting these transformations; they can be orientated towards practice, professional identity, and emotional support to address loneliness and sense-making; public discourses about entrepreneurship and innovation and territorial policies are not clearly linked to innovative practices in collaborative spaces. We conclude that there is need for better coordination between public actors and collaborative communities which should be seen at the heart of economic, educational, industrial and cultural policies targeting the city, aiming at collaborating and sharing.

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Introduction

The current transformation of work and society is taking multiple forms: globalisation (Giddens, 2000), the growth of entrepreneurship, independent work, telework and mobility (Raffaele & Connell, 2016), digital nomads (Gussekloo & Jacobs, 2016), self-production, value co-creation and social innovation (Bizzarri, 2014). Entrepreneurs and independent workers are assembled and disassembled, depending on market demand and on-going projects. Beyond the logic of a peripheral job market and firms outsourcing their activities, digital, legal and organisational structures are also aggregating and disaggregating. Digital transformation, new workspaces and project management are facilitating this evolution and collaborative co-working has the potential of creating a new kind of economy that supports community and innovation (Davies & Tollervey, 2013). Tounes and Fayolle (2006) argue that entrepreneurs are mobilised culturally and socially during periods of economic turmoil and social change. Merkel (2015) states that co-working spaces can be regarded “as a new form of urban social infrastructure enabling contacts and collaborations between people, ideas and connecting places”. In order to understand this evolution, we explore the emergence and practices of collaborative spaces, communities and movements.

We define collaborative communities as collectives of individual entrepreneurs, project workers and managers who build lasting collaborations in order to share practices. They consist of co-workers, makers, ‘fabbers’ and hackers who rely on digital infrastructures, collaborative spaces and places, and temporal structures. Their work is less easily defined than traditional work or occupational communities whose boundaries and identities they often question. We describe research carried out in several European cities to understand better these collaborative communities and movements in the context of digital work transformation. We suggest that policy decision-makers move from policies for to policies through collaborative communities and collaborative spaces.

A specific concern is the border between waged employment and entrepreneurship, and we found that new work practices make this border more and more porous, as illustrated by the emergence of professional trajectories based on alternate entrepreneurship. We also found that waged workers in traditional organisations not only suffer from stress but from boredom (Sundsted, Jones, & Bacigalupo, 2009). For the last 15 years or so, work practices have been transformed through the collaborative economy and new forms of collaboration. We explore the implications for workers and individuals, work collectives, social movements, and urban and societal dynamics. For individual workers, collaborative work spaces can lead to new competences, prospects, and sometimes new lives. For communities, collectives are important in work transformations. In the collaborative economy, entrepreneurship, independent work and mobility fragment working lives: belonging to a community becomes vital in providing practical, professional, identity and most importantly emotional support. A community can help address a crisis of meaning, fight boredom and loneliness for entrepreneurs. Finally social movements such as hackers/makers display governance and regulation models which can be of value to traditional organisations and public policy-makers.

Since the 1990s, digital actors-entrepreneurs have contributed business models disruptive of national and local interests. They endeavour to be actors in the city and many start-ups address citizens and communities through their extended value co-creation processes. They are often located in third spaces, such as WeWork,¹ which are reinventing ways to gather and aggregate workplaces, co-working and co-living practices in many cities,² disrupting the system of production of legitimate actors and discourses in the city. Beyond the sustainable, equitable and ethical aspects of digitally-based business models, collaborative spaces could have a role to play as they are at the heart of the city and its communities. Pressure now centres on individual activities and projects, where incentives to innovate have become stronger, through continuously evolving digital assemblages. However, this can only be maintained through communities which are difficult to envisage in a context where consumption and production take place primarily in homes and on the move.

This chapter offers a synthesis of empirical research carried out in 2014–16 by the Research Group on Collaborative Spaces (RGCS³). It is an international informal network of researchers interested in new work practices in the context of the collaborative economy with the aim of exploring collaborative spaces and communities. We engaged with entrepreneurs-makers and co-working space members through a series of visits, seminars and working groups on new work practices and work spaces in several major cities. Our overall purpose is to gain an understanding of practices and discourses about entrepreneurship, new innovative places, third-places and collaborative movements in cities and their public territorial policies linked to innovative places and collaborative spaces.

Our empirical material consists of field notes and documents from seminars, workshops and visits and an online questionnaire (378 respondents), involving approximately 1000 people in 8 cities (Paris, London, Montreal, Lyon, Grenoble, Barcelona, Amsterdam and Berlin). Seminars and meetings were carried out, and participants also communicate through a collaborative platform, a blog and Twitter. Some seminars were run inside collaborative spaces; participants included practitioners such as managers of and workers in third-places, members of collaborative communities and representatives of public city organizations.

This chapter is based on these events and encounters and some of the online questionnaire results. We first briefly review the rise of co-working spaces, their features and relationship to independent workers and entrepreneurs; we then present our findings according to the individual, community and societal levels of work practices associated to the collaborative economy and their spatial and temporal aspects. To conclude we highlight the need for better coordination between public actors, and between public actors and collaborative communities. Collaborative communities require a stronger coupling of public policies and should be seen at the heart of economic, educational, industrial and cultural policies targeting the city, aiming at collaborating and sharing.

The Rise of Co-working Spaces

Beyond Co-working Spaces: Diverse Third Places

The number of co-working spaces in the world multiplied 32 times between 2007 and 2013.⁴ According to Ross and Ressia (2015) they are a highly relevant area of research in relation to the future of work in an era of deregulated labour markets, telework and rapid technological change. The term ‘co-working’ appeared from the first time in the literature in a 1999 article by Bernie DeKoven (2002), a video games designer, as the phenomenon of “working together as equals” in a workspace and Spinuzzi (2012) defines it as “working alone together”.

Raffaele and Connell (2016) state that telecommuting has increased exponentially in recent years: The US has one of the highest rates of telecommuting adoption in the world, with approximately 16 million US employees working from home at least 1 day per month—about 10% of all employees. In Australia, it has been estimated that in 2013, 5.6 million adult Australians aged 18 years and over were ‘digital workers’, representing 51% of the total employed workforce. They argue that co-working practices have the potential to overcome some of the issues that telecommuting poses both from individual and organisational perspectives.

Co-working spaces are also regarded as ‘serendipity accelerators’, designed to “host creative people and entrepreneurs who endeavour to break isolation and find a convivial environment that favours meetings and collaboration” (Moriset, 2014). According to William van den Broeck, cofounder of the Mutinerie⁵ co-working space in Paris, co-working spaces are “a sustainable and clearly identified solution for entrepreneurs and freelancers looking to build a network and collaborate with like-minded people”. For example, Hurry (2012) found in his qualitative study that owners and users of the Canadian Halifax hub⁶ felt that it decreased isolation, offered networking opportunities, supported bootstrapping functions, and assisted with ideation and productivity. He concludes that co-working “could function as a platform for social engineering and activism through leveraging its networking capabilities to fully engage with the community, positively affecting the economic viability of the local area”.

A main characteristic of co-working places is a physical workspace, but their members often refer to a place, a time, a community. As well as a workspace, co-workers are looking for a ‘third place’, described by Oldenburg (1989, p. 16) as a place hosting “the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and [corporations].” Indeed, these places represent more than cheap working spaces and co-working is often associated with a strong attachment to a space and emotional support (Gerdenitsch, Scheel, Andorfer, & Korunka, 2016). Spreitzer, Bacevice, and Garrett (2015) found that people who use co-working spaces see their work as meaningful, they have more job control and they feel part of a community.

Reflecting this need, their members have over time increased in diversity. Users of co-working spaces include a wide range of actors. Large companies enable their teleworkers or teams of teleworkers to use them; SMEs may use them in a closed (e.g. using a whole floor) or open space fashion (sharing the space with other SMEs, for example a small communication agency at Coworking Republic⁷); co-workers and individuals in small groups (around 10 people), who can be said to be ‘micro’ organisations; or a range of independent workers, freelancers, micro-entrepreneurs, contract staff, students, the unemployed, seniors, mobile workers and teleworkers, trainees, ‘indie’ workers, small businesses, non-profit workers (DeGuzman & Tang, 2011) and many others. Holienka and Racek (2015) found that members of co-working spaces are mostly young professionals, predominantly men, who act as small businesses with the dominance of IT, creative and knowledge-intensive areas; that the perceived benefits are often the reason for selecting specific co-working spaces; and that the general satisfaction rate among co-working members is very high. However, they also signal that “co-working members may lack in ability to benefit from knowledge exchange and access to job/business opportunities”.

The Paradox of Community-Building

Co-working spaces also represent a paradox. Indeed, co-working is associated with flexibility and mobility due to ongoing organisational and work transformations and the disappearance of a traditional workplace (Pennel, 2013; Dale & Burrell, 2007) and the rise of flexible independent activities. Nevertheless, extending “the times and spaces of work into ever more aspects of everyday life (…) simultaneously attempts to obscure this colonisation” (Massey, 1995). Gandini (2015) also offers a critical review of the spread of co-working into a “buzzword with increasingly high expectations concerning the improvement of the socio-economic conditions of workers in the knowledge economy” and warns that it is important to interpret the co-working phenomenon in the landscape of the knowledge labour market, as it is connoted with the expectation of being the new and only model of work.

But simultaneously, there is an expressed need by co-workers to go beyond an ‘office to rent’, and belong to a social group or community; how can a community develop a more permanent identity in a context of constant fluidity? Leaderless communities have been discussed by Brafman and Beckstrom (2006) as:

• Self-organising, describing the capability of individuals to choose various ways of functioning and their level of autonomy and responsibility;

• Care of each other;

• Sense of ownership;

• Integration of new members.

Creating a social link is the challenge, but also maintaining and nurturing both strong and weak links leading to a sense of belonging to a community. Co-working spaces are an interesting recent new development in which to explore the potential for such community-building and collaboration.

Furthermore, in Westernised societies of the global North, many once-foundational jobs have been resigned to the past, are in short supply or have been dispatched offshore. According to Butcher (2016) “a new spirit of entrepreneurialism has emerged to fill the void”. He argues that co-working can sustain citizens’ entrepreneurial identity and help construct a “symbolic expression of unconventional and anti-organisational work” (i.e. in opposition to neoliberal and bureaucratic organisations). Co-working spaces are therefore particularly relevant to d’Andria and Gabarret (2017)’s argument that the entrepreneur can no longer be seen as solitary but as embedded in society, and their stress on the importance of networks of social relations to develop entrepreneurship.

Additionally, there is a growing recognition of agglomerations as key to supporting economic growth and the importance of cities in growth processes. Reuschke, Mason, Syrett, and Van Ham (2015) have studied business and household decisions in relation to business strategies, notably how household characteristics and strategy influence the development of new business and business growth in cities. However, they state that, at both theoretical and policy levels “there has been a disjuncture between perspectives on how people work, start-up businesses and innovate”.

Co-working and Entrepreneurship

Indeed, there is limited, if growing, literature on the role of co-working spaces for entrepreneurs. van Weele, Van Rijnsoever, and Steinz (2014) claim that “although the number of incubators, accelerators, co-working spaces and science parks is rapidly increasing around the world, little academic attention has been paid to the start-up communities that these initiatives create.” They respond to recently made calls for in-depth research in a study of start-up communities in three cities in Australia, a country that has seen a rapid growth in entrepreneurial activity. They found that “incubators and co-working spaces have an influence by introducing community managers and selection processes and creating optimal circumstances for start-up communities to prosper”.

Next we outline recent work which is striving to explore links between third places and entrepreneurship in various parts of the world, from quantitative to qualitative perspectives, and related to a range of issues such as: measuring entrepreneurial orientation and economic outcomes, studying urban ecosystems and entrepreneurial spatial distribution, the development of entrepreneurial social skills and learning processes, hackerspaces governance mechanisms, makerspaces and innovative thinking and knowledge sharing.

Co-working and Entrepreneurial Orientation

Gertner and Mack (2017) explore the differences in the ‘entrepreneurial orientation’ of different types of business support to entrepreneurs such as incubators, accelerators and co-working spaces and their results show variations related to their organisational context and suggest indicators for measuring different dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation. In a study of entrepreneurial hacker and co-working spaces Assenza (2015) examines how space, defined not only as physical space, but also as social context, and as a conceptual space within which production occurs, can contribute to new venture creation and offers a model for empirical measurement of interaction between spatial configuration and ultimate economic outcomes.

Co-working Entrepreneurs in Urban and Rural Spaces

In a qualitative study and survey of urban high tech entrepreneurs in Munich, Marx (2016) related co-working spaces functionally and spatially in the city, and the importance of co-working as a new paradigm of work for the entrepreneurs. He shows that numerous actors, big companies, universities and co-working operators, contribute in different ways to the positive development of the start-up scene in this dynamic ecosystem and that the spatial distribution of entrepreneurial activities is particularly taken into account.

Fuzi (2015) carried out an empirical exploration in Wales in the UK of whether co-working spaces can promote entrepreneurship in regions with sparse entrepreneurial environments by “creating the hard infrastructure particularly designed in such a way that the soft infrastructure necessary for entrepreneurship can also emerge”. She found that these spaces provide support (moral, emotional, professional, financial) and facilities (infrastructure) to enable entrepreneurs to start and grow their businesses.

Co-working and Network Skills

Drawing on ethnographic data gathered in a large case study of co-working spaces in Australia, Waters-Lynch and Potts (2017) demonstrate that the “main margin of value a co-working space provides is not price competition with serviced offices, or a more pleasant environment than working at home, but a focal point for finding people, ideas and other resources when you lack the information necessary for coordination.” Burret and Pierre (2014) examined how the co-working space La Muse in Geneva⁸ helped develop entrepreneurs’ social skills. They found that this type of organisation enabled the emergence of a peer network effect; this stimulates “the development of their abilities and their level of engagement in their project, as well as the opportunity to affect its development through interaction without significant start-up capital”. In her qualitative doctoral study of three co-working spaces in Paris, Fabbri (2015) found that, as well as improving knowledge transfer, belonging to a co-working space increased entrepreneurs’ credibility and provided them with access to partners through a ‘labelling’ and ‘window’ effect.

Co-working and Learning Processes

Bouncken and Reuschl (2016) show that entrepreneurial performance improves by the learning processes among co-working users that take upon the individual efficacy, trust and community among co-working users. They also warn that opportunism, often as knowledge leakage, will directly and indirectly spoil learning processes and entrepreneurial performance as it reduces their antecedents trust and community building. Allen (2017) studied hackerspaces and hackers as ‘proto-entrepreneurs’ and uncovered private governance mechanisms such as graduated social ostracism, collective action processes and nested hierarchies of rules. He concludes that “hackerspace anarchy may be a comparatively efficient institutional solution to the earliest stages of the entrepreneurial innovation problem compared to firms, markets and states.”

In an exploration of makerspaces in different countries and how they contribute to business generation and sustainment, Van Holm (2015) also found that the maker movement presents multiple avenues to increase access to tools, with potential for impacts on the quantity and nature of entrepreneurship. It attracts more individuals into product design, and thus may launch more “accidental entrepreneurs”. It also creates “dense but diverse networks, creating new ideas and innovative thinking (…) lowers the costs for prototyping, making early sales and acquiring outside funding more realistic”.

Co-working and Knowledge Sharing

Soerjoatmodjo, Bagasworo, Joshua, Kalesaran, and van den Broek (2015) explore how knowledge sharing occurs in co-working spaces through semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs from small and medium enterprises who are users of two co-working spaces in Jakarta. Occurring informally and voluntarily, and motivated by personal and business development, knowledge sharing amongst entrepreneurs in these co-working spaces involves donating and collecting tacit knowledge, shared around points of interaction such as pantry/kitchenette and coffee-makers and during lunch and/or afternoon coffee breaks, and endorsed through community culture formally declared in membership agreement and promoted by co-working space hosts. Knowledge not shared in these co-working spaces is trade secret-related. Subjects also admit that they refrain from sharing knowledge to direct competitors and knowledge sharing is also discouraged when the majority of available tables are dominated by particular companies.

Different Co-working Spaces Business Models: From Convenience Sharing to Collaborative Community-Building

Co-working spaces can be categorised into various forms. Some of the first actors were associations which initiated and participated in their development, opening them to the general public and becoming legitimate representatives of this movement through labels and certifications; for example the association Actipôle 21⁹; or participative ‘collectives’¹⁰ such as the cooperative Tiers Lieux,¹¹ which set up collective spaces for mainly independent workers in a spirit of co-opetition and community-building, with the aim of opening civic spaces for debate. Maker spaces (Dougherty, 2012; Hatch, 2013) and fab labs (Diez, 2012) are typical of this movement with the aim of empowering the “collective mind” and “redefining the future of production for mankind and its relation with the environment” and reshaping and reconfiguring “new models of production and creation” (Diez, 2012).

Traditional organisations have paid attention to the co-working phenomenon, as indicated by Pompa (2017) who shows how using digital platforms and co-working spaces may facilitate a company’s human resource management and assist the work of HR managers, especially with the conception and implementation of recruitment and motivational processes.

Institutional actors such as local authorities, regional councils or universities have financed spaces, partially or entirely. For example, the Mairie de Paris¹² has created 19 spaces for student-entrepreneurs; the University of Paris-Saclay¹³ has set up 7 innovation fab labs. Lumley (2014, see also Winkler, Saltzman, & Yang, 2016, about the rise of the ‘entrepreneurial university’) reports on a co-working project in a campus library to create a space to encourage student, faculty, and entrepreneur collaboration and interaction while demonstrating the economic value of the library. Frick (2015) describes key government initiatives in Norway to establish public incubators and co-working spaces to provide the necessary infrastructure for entrepreneurs to succeed with their innovations.

More broadly, Bouncken, Clauss, and Reuschl (2016) state that limited understanding exists on how coworking-space providers can design their business models for the differing user demands and their business models. They suggest “four layers of value creation and several value capture approaches to configure their business models along a continuum from rather basic efficiency-centered to novelty-centred full-service business models”. Castilho and Quandt (2017) explore the development of collaborative capability in co-working spaces, as perceived by the main stakeholders in fourteen co-working spaces, located in six Asian countries, involving 31 stakeholders. Their results indicate that “convenience sharing” co-working spaces are mostly related to knowledge sharing and supporting collective action towards an effective execution, whereas ‘community building’ co-working spaces are more related to enhancing a creative field and supporting individual actions for collective results, showing a clear influence of a collaboration capability in ‘community building’ spaces.

However, the market for co-working spaces has now exploded and private, global enterprises, banks, real estate or investors are capitalising on the trend. Frick (2015) states that rapid changes took place in Norway when private companies started their own hubs. This is leading to competitive pressures and, according to some, “industrialising the market and losing the original values of the co-working movement” (Co-working Manager Interview, June 2016 in Dandoy, 2016).

Methodology

The RGCS network started in June 2014 and after two years of activities included groups in 8 cities, with around 1000 people participating in events organised by core members. The profiles of participants are varied: academics in management, economics, sociology, political sciences, design, ergonomics, architecture, urban studies; managers and owners of third spaces; consultants in organisational design and strategy; open innovation managers and project managers; representatives of public institutions such as boroughs, town halls, municipalities, regional councils, universities, urban conurbations; students, representatives of civic society and associative movements.

52 events were organised, such as seminars, workshops and meetings in cities in 6 countries (Paris, Lyon and Grenoble in France, London in the UK, Montreal in Canada, Barcelona in Spain, Amsterdam in Holland, and Berlin in Germany) with a range of participants, usually combining practitioners and academics. Before or after these events and on other occasions, visits of 82 co-working spaces, maker spaces, fab labs and hacker spaces took place in 8 countries (Paris, Lille and Lyon in France, London in the UK, Montreal in Canada, Berlin in Germany, Barcelona in Spain, Lisbon in Portugal, Singapore and Sydney in Australia). A demonstration in Berlin was organised in July 2016.¹⁴ These events provided us with the opportunity to meet and talk to a large number of entrepreneurs and co-workers. 46 semi-structured interviews with managers of and workers in collaborative spaces were carried out in 10 countries (Germany, England, Australia, Canada, Spain, US, France, Italy, Portugal, Singapore), 1450 photos and 30 short films of collaborative spaces and their surroundings were taken, and 900 pages of field notes were produced by a number of RGCS members. The material gathered allowed us to compare a range of spatial designs, business models, work practices, city dynamics and public policies. Based on these activities, discussions, encounters and exchanges, RGCS published various online documents to report to its participants and beyond.¹⁵

This chapter is based on the analysis of these activities and of an online survey carried out in May 2016. The questionnaire can be found on the RGCS website¹⁶ and focuses on new work practices and collaborative spaces. The target was recent graduates as we thought this category may include a higher proportion of young entrepreneurs and/or workers with experience of collaborative spaces. This targeting was opportunistic, no scientific sampling was intended. We gained access to alumni email databases from our RGCS academic contacts in three major cities, London, Paris and Montreal. We received approximately 1500 responses, but only processed 378 responses in an initial analysis, by selecting a sample based on age (21–30 years old) and academic qualifications—people who had studied in at least two countries, which we thought could be more likely to have adopted new work practices. This sample includes tele-workers, co-workers and most are in permanent employment. Permanent and non-permanent workers represent 63% of this sample, whereas entrepreneurs and independent workers 15% (see Fig. 2.1). Men and women are almost equally represented in each category (see Fig. 2.2).

Fig. 2.1

Professional status

Fig. 2.2

Gender and professional status

The focus of the questionnaire was work transformation and collaborative spaces and it included filter questions to identify individuals with experience of collaborative spaces in order to probe them further. Our aim was to gain an understanding at the following three different levels (see Fig. 2.3). At the individual level, we wanted to elicit people’s viewpoints about their current work practices in relation to their professional status, positions and activities. The community level (e.g. co-workers, managers or owners of co-working spaces) was important to consider the collective aspects of work practices. At the societal level, we aimed to gain insights into any social movement thinking underlying the emergence of these working practices, for instance from hackers/makers/fabbers, and their implications for communities and public policies. For each level, we paid attention to the spatial and temporal dimensions of work practices: space-time, i.e. how personal and collective time is managed; space-place, i.e. how third spaces organise space; and space-territory, i.e. whether and how third spaces are embedded in a city and their networks.

Fig. 2.3

Three levels of analysis of new work practices in the collaborative economy

Findings

Field Notes, June 2014, London Technology Week

We are attending this exhibition, it is early in the morning. I am taking photos and filming short video clips of visitors arriving through the main entrance. There are hundreds, thousands of people. An entire city is pouring into these old industrial wharves; I am listening to a group of 3 people nearby, talking about their start-up. I realise that most of these thousands of individuals are entrepreneurs. Only a few are waged workers, in the digital or IT industry, public relations, marketing or communication. This is a trigger for me, probably experienced by RGCS participants and other academics. Beyond statistics and a frame of mind, this is becoming tangible: work is being transformed, entrepreneurship is spreading and becoming commonplace, together with a culture of ‘doing’. A few days later I attend an event in Shoreditch, which I do not recognize from 15 years ago. All around me there are new co-working spaces, entrepreneurs, hipsters; the atmosphere is playful and jolly. Exchanging glances with some people I can sense that there probably is another side to this coin, a less glamourous reality, but the seeds are planted. Many questions spring to my mind: is our university teaching still adapted to this evolution? Does our understanding of entrepreneurship correspond to this reality? Can we still delegate this transversal and manifold competence to a single ‘entrepreneurship’ colleague or course? Is our teaching reference point, the enterprise rather than assembled entrepreneurs, still relevant? What about our research in management? Have enterprises, big and small, understood the challenges of this transformation? Have citizens, beyond media reports and fears, realised what is happening? Despite these questionings, it is worth remembering that the large majority of workers are still in waged employment. For instance, out of 25.8 million workers in France, 22.8 million are waged (INSEE, 2014). Common products are still made in large numbers by traditional firms, far away from fab labs and maker spaces. Will future changes come from enterprises themselves, or from urban collaborative communities? (RGCS Academic).

Individual Work Practices: Waged Versus Independent Employment?

New Professional Trajectories

Commonly found views in the media and management worlds (e.g. human resource management, see Pompa, 2017) tend to oppose the waged worker-follower-performer to the entrepreneur-innovator-creator. Accordingly, there are only two incompatible life choices, ‘being’ a waged worker or ‘becoming’ an entrepreneur. The latter are adventurous, operate in loose communities and multiple projects, take risks and have precarious lives. On the other hand, the former benefit from job security, attachment to an organisation, social status, and the comfort of a stable role and hierarchical structures. Entrepreneurs, and independent non-waged workers at large, are seen as an unavoidable solution to the economic crisis—also argued by some as due to a lack of entrepreneurial spirit and freedom. Current issues such as universal income, the ‘uberisation’ of economies and digital transformation (with some well paid big data workers but many less secure ‘pickers’ and software analysts down the chain) have instigated a rather dichotomous debate about waged and independent workers. The question of ‘forced’ entrepreneurship and independent work was frequently discussed in our workshops and seminars in many places. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (2017) reports, around 40% of entrepreneurs who have created a company had no real choice: their job searches were unsuccessful, they were fired, ‘span off’, or more or less forced to become intrapreneurs. We are not contesting these figures but our findings paint a more nuanced picture.

People in our seminars and workshops, especially in London and Paris, discussed time and professional trajectories (past and planned) extensively; many young people do not oppose waged work to entrepreneurship. Questionnaire responses displayed equal concerns from both waged and independent workers about time management. In both cases, new work practices are provoking the same difficulties in separating professional and personal lives and blurring the boundary between waged and independent work. Laurent (2016) reports research findings showing that an entrepreneur works more than an average waged worker but less than an executive; entrepreneurs enjoy less holiday time, which together with higher pressures, has long-term repercussions on their health. In some cases, it is worth noting that time pressures are experienced more negatively by waged workers, and that independent workers do not feel overwhelmed by time constraints (Fig. 2.4). Responses to questions about feeling involved at work, thinking about professional problems when waking up, considering organisational problems as one’s own, or sacrificing too much for one’s work, show, surprisingly, little difference between waged and independent workers.

Fig. 2.4

Perceptions of time constraints in entrepreneurs and waged workers

‘Slashers’ or workers cumulating several jobs, often a waged activity and an entrepreneurial activity through an organisation or an association, represent for instance 2 million people in France of which 70% do so willingly (INSEE, 2014). It shows the emergence of alternate professional trajectories which can take the following shape. A new graduate creates a start-up. S/he develops competencies essential to most management professions: managing projects and managing through projects; the capacity to formulate and communicate the goals to a diverse range of communities; and resistance to stress and loneliness… In our conversations with young graduates attending our events, we found them very aware of the demand for such transversal competencies. An engineering graduate told us “I want to become an entrepreneur to become a waged salaried employee” which seems paradoxical but in fact is not contradictory. Another spent one year working on a start-up after graduating, and then got recruited by a large consulting group as open innovation manager. Once recruited, it is then possible to apply and refine these competencies and extend one’s network, in order to then become again an entrepreneur 2 or 3 years later—based on what could be an overall strategy or simply an opportunity, a spin off, intrapreneurship or a change in personal circumstances. Individuals in the third loop of Fig. 2.5 are slightly older (25–30 years), have had first a short entrepreneurial experience and then 3–4 years of waged employment. Some express strong ambitions: “I think this will help me climb up… move to an executive position, in project management or digital transformation”. This is different from chosen or enforced entrepreneurship.

Fig. 2.5

Alternate entrepreneurship

Some insights were provided in our interviews and encounters: “Fight against boredom… I saw my father get bored to death in his professional career, which has been a straight road”; “Progress fast, move, be disruptive in my employment like in my start-up”; “The labour market will appreciate entrepreneurial behavioural more and more”. And Fig. 2.6 shows that in terms of well-being, entrepreneurs or independent workers seem happier at work, even very happy, than waged workers in our respondents.

Fig. 2.6

Comparing perceptions of well being at work between entrepreneurs and waged workers

From the perspective of third spaces, we found that some already integrate the career loops we suggest in Fig. 2.6. A manager of a co-working space, also housing an incubator, told us his business was “becoming a human resources management consulting firm”. Beyond their projects and start-ups themselves, the entrepreneurs they host are recruitment targets, because of their individual competences and employability. This manager was planning to organise events such as recruitment fairs, although this may be still an unusual case.

In the French case, public policies have contributed to this development, for instance through the new status of ‘student-entrepreneur’,¹⁷ probably with the sole aim of facilitating the first career loop rather than the two following ones we suggest. New French university alliances, particularly in business and management education, have supported such initiatives in order to gain legitimacy and differentiate themselves from traditional universities. Like universities in many other countries, they are investing in labs, incubators, accelerators and co-working spaces and are recruiting students with profiles and ambitions amenable to these new professional trajectories.

An Emotional Dimension to New Work Practices

Our interviews and visits to third spaces revealed an emotional dimension to their time-space arrangements, which is rarely found in traditional work environments. These new workers express a need for an almost familial cell structure which some called “a community”, “a gang of friends”, “an extension of students’ associations and parties” or even “a tribe”. Many of our questionnaire respondents come from outside the cities where they carried out their secondary education. Their families, childhood friends and acquaintances are often far away. Going to universities in the big cities, they feel “catapulted” far from home and hang on to their newly found “gang of friends” for talking, exchanging and managing emotions such as stress, loneliness, and the hardships of an entrepreneurial project: “Talking on Skype is OK, but having a beer with other entrepreneurs from the workspace is better… And many have found partners here [laughter]” (see also¹⁸).

Third spaces can be seen as emotional communities as much as communities of practice. When asked to define a community, managers of third spaces use the following terms: “people you can trust”, “a group of people helping each other”, “shared and convergent values”, “friendly atmosphere and mutual help”, so beyond a good work climate. For managers of third spaces, what is at the core of a community is reciprocal exchanges (47%) rather than spatial (20%) or technological (13%) aspects, or events (13%). This is confirmed by a GCUC (2016) global survey of co-working spaces which found that co-workers’ feeling of being part of a community has increased from 58% in 2011–12, to 61% in 2013–14 and 70% in 2015–16.

During some of our visits, we also learnt that waged workers enjoy participating to the life of ‘corporate’ third spaces (or ‘corpo-working’), for instance hackathons and training events where they mix with invited external entrepreneurs and innovators, which they find “entertaining” and “disruptive”. These spaces are also used to manage geographic mobility for national and international workers and teleworkers. Beyond managing a space and enterprise social networks, their managers see themselves as ‘community managers’ and emphasise “horizontality and transversality”, “mutual exchanges”, “rejection of hierarchies”, “facilitating rather than organising”, and “community management”. This represents a shift from hierarchy and coordination to relational logics.

Several interviewees talked about the ‘post-wage’ status of community managers. Similarly to a project manager, a community manager assembles internal and external waged workers and independent workers; this requires flexible interacting with actors in third spaces, elsewhere and on electronic social network platforms, and also with consumers who are becoming ever present. The community manager’s roadmap and necessary competences are therefore challenging: “community management… its meaning keeps changing as I manage it”.

New Work Practices and Communities

The notion of communities is far from new for business academics and practitioners alike, and there are many terms to describe them such as occupational or professional communities, communities of trade, or communities of practice, amongst many. Much is hoped for from informal collective communities forming at the intersection of formal organisations in terms of innovative potential, knowledge management, and a more humane and local human resource management. In our constantly assembled and disassembled digital ‘entrepreuneurialised’ economies, communities have come to represent the community-based innovative stitching of micro-coordination which seems to happen in third spaces. A co-worker tells us how happy he is in this space. He plans his comings and goings according to not only his projects but his appointments and his mood: “when I feel a little low, I come more often, the energy here is great.” In an artists’ maker space in Barcelona,¹⁹ the manager tells us she does not organise events but parties. The space we visit looks like a musical or theatre stage setting.

Throughout the day, personal working times mingle with collective events such as breakfasts, coffee breaks, pitches, training sessions, hackathons, sharing reflexions, coaching, games and challenges between teams, etc. Event calendars are displayed on websites, walls and newsletters. There is evidence of intergenerational approaches mixing different age groups or with specific events for children (“coding and cakes”) or seniors (“digital lunches for oldies”).

Community managers play an essential role. A fab lab manager tells us of how his successor was taken by surprise when people came to him for chats, confided in him, shared their problems and “unwind”, as they had done with her before. Tech Hub in Berlin²⁰ has a ‘Chief Happiness Officer’. Two thirds of third space managers in our questionnaire stated that their communication material promises to make members feel part of a community. The role of community managers can be underestimated: 88% of our questionnaire respondents state that they facilitate the emergence of collaborations, 50% that they establish relations with the neighbourhood and local communities and 67% say they “look after everything”. 82% think that relational skills are absolutely essential, compared to 59% for technical and 47% for financial and administrative competences.

Visiting third spaces is also carefully organised and is seen as entering a community: it starts with the kitchen, the coffee machine, meeting people, telling anecdotes about the furniture and the rooms and the social events. Commonly used sentences during visits are “you will join our community”, “community members often meet…”, “the events we organise are at the heart of our community”. Of course, the quality of the equipment, machines, IT facilities, physical layout, open and working spaces and the infrastructure matter, with a wide range of design, working and cultural styles across different spaces. Overall the dominant emphasis is on “spaces for competence-building, creativity and innovation”.

The spaces are also envisaged as “windows” into larger communities or territories. For instance, the Internet of Things Start-up Ecosystem²¹ accelerator space is situated in the IoT Valley in Toulouse and was created by an association aiming to “develop IoT excellence and productivity across regional entrepreneurs, industrialists and academics”. They act as intermediary or boundary objects between start-ups, business angels, large enterprises, support structures and political institutions, concentrating know-how and creativity.

A “tourism industry of collaborative spaces” (interview with a hacker) is also emerging in many places, for instance in Berlin. To promote their region, public bodies, regional and local authorities, universities and consulting firms are joining forces to organise tours of several spaces together, or “learning expeditions”. These are offered as “experiences, a time to reflect and make contacts” and are charged for through a fee or a donation. There appears to be a growing demand for these, which is clearly capitalised on by third spaces managers, but at the risk of disturbing the peace and quiet for workers (our hacker above was ironical in his description of a ‘tourism industry’!) and increasing community managers’ workloads.

The issue of open innovation is a part of this phenomenon. It is an important challenge, as indicated in our survey with 73% of managers of third spaces deeming it crucial. From our visits and interviews, we suggest that there are currently three scenarios to support open innovation: relocation, ‘excubation’, and transition.

• Relocation involves seconding waged workers to a corporate or independent third space for several days, weeks or even months. Some of the expected benefits are new collaborations, learning new techniques and business intelligence.

• Excubation is about relocating parts of a project or an organisation, with its members and some resources, to a third space. Expected benefits are similar to the ones for relocations.

• Transition concerns waged or independent workers who travel long-distances for projects, and allocated a subscription to a third-space situated in a geographically convenient place, or are located for episodic stays in their clients’ internal third spaces. For instance, the Mixer innovation hub²² in Paris offers seven ‘flex offices’ to their collaborators visiting their headquarters.

As well as practical solutions, these spaces and mechanisms provide emotional support above all, which was expressed to us strongly in hackerspaces and makerspaces such as Noisebridge,²³ a non-profit educational technical-creative hackerspace based in San Francisco, C-Base,²⁴ an early digital activists hackerspace in Berlin, the Open Innovation Space in Berlin²⁵ and Hangar, an artists’ makerspace in Barcelona, already mentioned above. Hackerspaces and makerspaces are more inspired by social movement ethics, but are often reduced by managers to hackathons, mainly run by corporate third spaces, or to a vague principle of hacking: “we now need to hack management…” Hackerspaces in particular, but also some makerspaces, run on new forms of governance, based on ‘hacker ethics’ centred on the community. This means agreeing on and regulating the value of a hack (a bit like academic peer-reviewing) as a collective. This implies long and time-consuming discussions aiming at a consensus (voting is seen negatively), listening, talking, observing and equalising speech times. This often takes place in the biggest open space.

Hackers regulate themselves by and through their professional community which shares and renders matters explicit during multiple collective exchanges. Group endogenous control is part and parcel of exogenous control by a bigger community outside the specific space, and a larger social movement. The hacker communities we observed were very heterogeneous: independent workers, freelancers, students, waged workers, academics; more entrepreneurs and co-workers during the day, and more hackers and makers in the evenings. Clearly, these practices may also have limitations when groups break away from exogenous control and run the risk of becoming inward-looking and sectarian, or if social movements rigidify.

Collaborative Movements and New Work Practices

Our third level of analysis is societal. Makerspaces, hackerspaces and fab labs were easily associated to a well-known social movement in the discussions we witnessed. Co-working is different. This phenomenon was more commonly referred to as an “industry”, a “societal trend”, or “innovation-related”. Some co-working movements, for instance the French collective of third places,²⁶ the Associacio de Coworking de Catalunya²⁷ or Coworking Europe,²⁸ strive to structure and incarnate a social movement. However, many of the people we interviewed and talked to during our events were not convinced. Collaborative movements can be split into two categories which seem in opposition to each other: the activists and participants in the hacker/maker social movement; and the managers looking for “disruptive experiences” and in search of innovation. Makers, hackers and fabbers nurture the common good and promote open knowledge to move away from enterprise closed systems, and for them capitalist business enterprises and relentless innovation are ambiguous. Doing and learning together are more important.

Field Notes and Discussion in a Paris Makerspace, June 2016

I spend over an hour with a group of enthusiastic makers who talk about their drone. They have spent hundreds of hours building it together. They tell me about their ideas, tricks, reuses and adaptations… They have clearly sacrificed many evenings for this project. The little plane is impressive and beautiful. It shows scars of much tinkering. Before leaving them to go to another project I ask them whether it could fly. “No, it is far too heavy!” (RGCS Academic).

We saw many unfinished prototypes in the makerspaces and hackerspaces we visited—although there may be more entrepreneurial hackers pushing for completion of projects. Endless and aimless learning can sometimes lead to real and useful innovations. During one of our seminars, a fab lab manager mentioned the case of someone who had come to his corporate space to produce a photo frame using a 3D printer; he came out with a renewed vision of technical processes which led to managing his projects using 3D multiple prototypes as intermediary objects for his team members. Some makers and hackers have also finalised processes for bypassing built-in technical obsolescence in lightbulbs, computers and home appliances, which corresponds well to their ethical aims. Sometimes the aim is even more ambitious, like the French ICI Montreuil²⁹ manager who sees his maker space as an “engine for reindustrialisation”.

The purist hackers are often very critical about corporate third spaces. A manager of a university fab lab told us: “if these were real fab labs, I could easily go there without making an appointment and they would share their knowledge and procedures with everyone… even their competitors! Everything I do in my fab lab is open, even to our university and academic rivals! Here is the proof! [pointing to a researcher sitting there]”.

On the other hand, business enterprises draw heavily from collaborative movements, and innovative entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship are major strategies—to the point of sometimes not really having a clear strategic vision; this has been described to us by some managers in our events as “a strategic smokescreen”. Makers, hackers and co-workers are seen as obvious (easy?) solutions to focus on professional communities, “hack management”, induce tinkering and serendipity, and ‘free’ the enterprise from its walls and hierarchies. Corporate hacking is articulated by some we encountered as a means to “move the lines”, “provide a sense of opportunity and organisational improvisation”, “a positive diversion from established practices”. Corporate hackers aim to improve and transform enterprises rather than challenge their raison d’être.³⁰

Nevertheless importing hacking and co-working practices to corporate environments can be innovative (e.g. for research and development, see Fuzi, Clifton, & Loudon, 2014). In a context of increasing workers’ mobility, third spaces can help build a network of stopovers for urban and rural workers and managers. Joint corporate third spaces, with partners and even competitors, independent third spaces to relocate workers or excubate projects, can stimulate business intelligence and innovative potential. They can help become aware of emerging projects and gain from coaching with seniors (who may also benefit from ‘reverse mentoring’). It is possible to set up open innovation approaches including external entrepreneurs, student-entrepreneurs, resident hackers, workers from distant places, etc.

Conclusion

Collaborative movements are often expected to provide a disruptive impetus for traditional business organisations, where there is talk of ‘hacking’ management, enterprises, their language, procedures and tools. The emergence of the ‘bore out’ syndrome or exhaustion through boredom in traditional organisations seems to originate from pressures to conform which curtail personal development and creativity (Gino, 2016). Some companies are trying to stimulate innovative behaviour and creativity, for instance Google³¹ policy of 20% time, leaving a day a week free for employees to work on their own projects.

Learning to become innovative happens not only by learning about it but through practicing it. Our research survey on third space co-workers and managers in cities in several countries found that, although the divide between waged and independent workers remains large, we are witnessing the emergence of professional trajectories in young people alternating waged and independent work across lifetimes; and there is also existing evidence of slashers cumulating waged and entrepreneurial activities across short-term time and space spans.

Collaborative third spaces such as co-working spaces, makerspaces, hackerspaces, fab labs, incubators or digital labs can mix waged and independent workers through new governance models such as excubation, transition, relocation, open innovation, and community management. This is closely related to hacker social movements, which are attracting interest from traditional organisations. These two worlds collide, cross over and feed each other. Some argue that the hacker community spirit and ethics of collaborative social movements may get lost when captured and colonised by business organisations (Richard, 2014). Opting for open source, running hackathons, setting up corpo-working spaces, or instigating corporate maker cultures are signs of a management which seeks meaning and ‘free itself’ which may well be utopian and often relies on techno-utopian entrepreneur heroes (Anderson, 2012). In this respect, the activist counter culture in collaborative movements (Lallement, 2015; Bottolier-Despois, 2012, see also the growth of cooperative and participative associations³²) may well inspire a rethinking of work practices and a return to communities and collaborative practices. Our research aimed to transcend existing dichotomies and better understand emerging work practices, manifest in third spaces.

Further work could focus on the relationships between third spaces and local, city, regional and public planning authorities. The latter tend to have outdated presuppositions about new and future work practices, as found in our discussions with the Reinvent Paris³³ project and TechCity in London. Capdevila (2015, 2017) argues that co-working spaces contribute “to the interaction between co-located actors through the articulation of places, spaces, projects and events” and he suggests that public policies could support “the emergence and development of innovation by fostering innovative processes outside firms” and the “innovative and creative capacity of cities”. Topics such as co-living (e.g. WeWork³⁴), the growth of co-working spaces erected by private building contractors, the strong links with some large food-catering companies (e.g. Starbuck), transport issues (e.g. French railways and its co-working spaces³⁵) show that a range of business actors are more and more present in the ‘market’ of collaborative spaces. Indeed, Gandini (2015) alerts us to an emerging ‘co-working bubble’ given that co-working is being increasingly used for branding, marketing and business purposes. Faced with these business actors, public institutions are currently rather disjointed and EU structural funds, regional, district and metropolitan authorities still think in terms of major material investments and long-term irreversible choices which may hamper the collaborative economy.

The choice of location is and may become more structuring of urbanism, city spaces and mobility. Some effects can be gentrification and unwelcome changes to real estate costs and housing rentals. Mariotti, Pacchi, and Di Vita (2017) recently stated that “location patterns and the effects co-working spaces generate on the urban context are issues that have been neglected by the existing literature”. To fill this gap about the location patterns of these new working spaces and their urban effects at different scales, both in terms of urban spaces and practices, they focus on Milan, the core of the Italian knowledge-based, creative, digital, and sharing economy, and the city hosting the largest number of co-working spaces in Italy. Their field research illustrates how the participation of workers in co-working spaces in local community initiatives can contribute to urban revitalisation trends and micro-scale physical transformations. Waters-Lynch et al. (2016) also suggest future research directions on co-working spaces by “linking relevant extant theory with key questions across the fields of economic geography, urban planning economics and organisational studies”.

Overall we concur with Houtbeckers (2017)’s view that there is a “need for alternatives to the heroic representations of entrepreneurship (…) which affect how the phenomenon is represented in academic and public discussions”. Her ethnographic study reflects on the “shifting positions manifested in the entanglement of stories of the researcher and the people met during the fieldwork”. The stories she unveiled show how “for some the co-working space was a place for hope while for others it caused distress and even burnout”. She found that despite its failure in the form of a bankruptcy, the co-working cooperative succeeded in enabling social innovation in the form of hope and personal development—also for the researcher herself.

Finally, based on this initial research, we suggest some practical recommendations for various co-working stakeholder groups in Table 2.1 in order to make the most of the innovative and collaborative community-building potential of third places.

Table 2.1 Practical suggestions