The new topologies of collaborative workspace assemblages between the market and the commons

The key to happiness in collaborative workplaces. Evidence from coworking spaces

“…According to figures estimated pre-COVID-19, up until 2022, the average annual growth rate of the entire spectrum of shared workspaces (e.g., coworking spaces, hackerspaces, business incubators, accelerators) worldwide was 13% (Appel-Meulenbroek et al 2020 ), with around 5 million users (Avdikos and Pettas 2021 ) of almost 50,000 spaces (Rese et al 2020 ), most of which are classified as coworking spaces.…”

“…Such spaces mainly serve startups and tech freelancers/companies, aiming to promote business development. The latter are structured in a more bottom-up manner and are oriented toward independent workers and small and social enterprises that tend to be more interested in the “collaborative use of common pool resources and new, hybrid labour (re)arrangements” (Avdikos and Pettas 2021 , p. 44). Consequently, they display, in our view, higher potential as an innovative organizing paradigm, which is why we focus on this kind of coworking space to pursue our research goals.…”

“…The combination of the varied perspectives and approaches to which people are exposed via social interactions is also facilitated. As highlighted above, coworking spaces provide an extremely fertile environment for building various powerful relations (Avdikos and Pettas 2021 ), through which interactions and exchanges among different workers are multiplied (Perry-Smith 2006 ). This sharing “spirit” encourages individuals to cooperate and make efforts on behalf of the group while, at the same time, strengthening the expectations about others doing the same (Bogaert et al 2012 ).…”

“…This has led to a variety of “collaborative workplaces” (Avdikos and Pettas 2021 ), which represent significant examples of the sharing economy Bouncken et al 2020b ; Merkel 2015 ; Reuschl et al 2021 ). Among the many emerging models and archetypes (Avdikos and Merkel 2020 ; Bouncken et al 2018 ; Resch and Steyaert 2020 ), independently owned coworking spaces (Appel-Meulenbroek et al 2020 ) are receiving a great deal of attention as they offer users unique opportunities to combine autonomy, self-determination, and cooperation (Waters-Lynch and Duff 2021 ) through an “orchestrated” (Brown 2017 ) interplay of formality and informality (Bouncken et al 2020a , b ).…”

“…In this view, coworking spaces can be framed as “dynamic assemblages” (Avdikos and Pettas 2021 ; Jakonen et al 2017 ) where various kinds of users can find ways to develop social ties with inspiring people, learn from them, improve idea generation and implementation (Butcher 2018 ; Gerdenitsch et al 2016 ), and build new business opportunities or creative ideas while actualizing their unique configuration of personal strengths, talents, and preferences (Orel et al 2021 ; Spinuzzi et al 2018 ). These aspects appear to be consistent with the main drivers of happiness (Deci and Ryan 1985 ; Nezlek 2001 ) and particularly with the drivers of happiness at work (Rego et al 2011 ), which is an increasingly relevant topic within the managerial and organizational discourse (Liu et al 2020 ; Salas-Vallina et al 2020 ) as work environments progressively become structured in a bottom-up, loose fashion (Bouncken et al 2018 ; Garrett et al 2017 ; Spinuzzi 2012 ).…”