Mediation Matters: The Role of Staff in Coworking Constitution

Haubrich, Gislene Feiten

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-62167-4_9

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Coworking spaces help break geographic and institutional barriers to open collaboration (Rus and Orel, 2015) by co-constructing a sense of supportive community (Garrett et al, 2017) that is managed by moderators such as community managers (Gregg and Lodato, 2018;Bouncken et al, 2018;Spinuzzi et al, 2019;Haubrich, 2021) using mediation mechanisms (Brown, 2017) to employ a community-based governance model (Castilho and Quandt, 2017). Mediation mechanisms most commonly take the form of facilitation tools (e.g., matchmaking events, conversation starters, etc.)…”

Section: The Characteristics Of Coworking Spacesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Collaborative communities as a selling point? From community-driven to service-purposed coworking spaces

Orel

Bennis

2021

ESR&P

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Coworking spaces emerged in the mid-2000s as collaborative workplaces that actively supported teleworkers and self-employed knowledge workers who shared various (work) environments to interlace themselves in supportive networks, tackle isolation, positively influence well-being, and collaboratively participate in knowledge-sharing activities. However, with the swift popularisation of the coworking model by 2020, newly established flexible office spaces have begun to refer to themselves as community-based workplaces even though they lacked the capacity to support their users’ interactions and collaborative work. Therefore, the purpose of the paper is to explore how coworking spaces have transformed from community-based environments to a flexible place of work where establishing a collaborative community is not an organisational priority. The following exploratory research investigates a sample of 13 coworking spaces in Prague, the Czech Republic, and considers their capacity for supporting interactions and collaborative processes between their users. The results uncovered significant differences between coworking spaces, their spatial designs, the presence of mediation mechanisms, and the frequency of interactions between users, and suggest that the handful of sampled coworking environments misuse the notion of community. In that context, the following study indicates that contemporary coworking spaces can revert to community washing to deliberately pursue economic self-interest rather than support decentralised peer-to-peer exchange that would lead to developing a coworking community.

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