This article develops an understanding of coworking spaces as organizational phenomena. Based on an ethnography of betahaus in Berlin, we demonstrate how coworking spaces not only provide a sense of community but also pattern the work activities of their members. We theorize this finding by drawing on the emergent literature on organizationality. Our contribution is twofold. First, we challenge current understandings of coworking spaces as neutral containers for independent work. Instead, we show how coworking incorporates the disposition of becoming organizational. That is, coworking spaces can frame and organize work and may even provide a basis for collective action. Second, we add to research on organizing outside traditional organizations by drawing attention to the complex and shifting interplay of formal and informal relationships in such settings. In doing so, we inform current debates about new forms of organization and organizing.

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The emergent ‘uses of the past’ literature challenges traditional perspectives on history as an objective constraint for organizational action. It does so by putting forward an interpretivist view that highlights the moulding and shaping of history as a resource that enables action. We build upon and extend this approach by demonstrating how a more explicit attention to materiality reveals ‘the dual nature of the past’ as not simply constraining and/or enabling but also actively orienting organizational action in the present. We draw upon research on organizational remembering and the concept of affordance to theorize the entanglement of organizational remembering and the material technologies of memory. We examine the dynamics of organizational remembering and materiality in the context of the British Museum’s digitization efforts. We show how narratives about the past enable organizational actors to make sense of and repurpose a novel material technology of memory (computers) through the construction of affordances. However, we also demonstrate how the materiality of objects inherited from the past also actively constrained and oriented how actors worked upon various obstacles on the path to digitization. We make two contributions. First, we develop how the dual nature of the past constitutes a novel way to reconcile deterministic and voluntarist interpretations of the past in organizations by assigning a more active role to material objects in organizational remembering. Second, we introduce a novel way to theorize organizational memory as an ongoing process of mutual constitution between technologies of memory (Speicher) and social practices of remembering (Gedächtnis).