‘It's like, instant respect’: Coworking spaces as identity anchoring environments in the new economy

• Published date: 01 March 2023
• Author: Peter A. Bacevice,Gretchen M. Spreitzer
• Date: 01 March 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12254

Received: 1 June 2021

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Accepted: 5 July 2022

DOI: 10.1111/ntwe.12254

RESEARCH ARTICLE

‘It's like, instant respect’: Coworking spaces

as identity anchoring environments

in the new economy

Peter A. Bacevice|Gretchen M. Spreitzer

Management & Organizations,

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,

Michigan, USA

Correspondence

Peter A. Bacevice, Stephen M. Ross

School of Business, University of

Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.

Email: bacevice@umich.edu

Abstract

As employment relationships become more tenuous, as

work grows increasingly virtual and as professional

reputations circulate across online platforms, cow-

orking provides individuals across various work

arrangements with shared workspaces oriented to-

wards sociability, visibility and convenience. Our study

explores how coworking spaces also enable individuals

to shape their professional identities while providing

other important attributes of work to help it feel

embodied and grounded. Drawing from interviews and

surveys of members of a large coworking chain across

the United States, we find that coworking spaces serve

as identity anchoring environments. We find that many

workers use material elements of the space to ground

their professional identities in three ways: evidencing

professional credibility, enacting a common ethos and

energising connections with others. More broadly, we

also find that coworking operators package and sell the

physical, spatial and symbolic aspects of work to help

certain workers signal their professional selves.

KEYWORDS

coworking, holding environment, new economy, professional

identity, reputation

New Technol Work Employ. 2023;38:59–81. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ntwe

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This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs License, which permits

use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or

adaptations are made.

© 2022 The Authors. New Technology, Work and Employment published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

INTRODUCTION

In the new economy (Bauman, 2000; Sennett, 1998,2006; Vallas, 2012), many workers lack

traditional work spaces that socially bind workers to each other and provide the foundations

that anchor their professional identities. For many individuals navigating the conditions and

realities of the new economy, this circumstance frames an ongoing struggle (Barley &

Kunda, 2006; Caza et al., 2017; Petriglieri et al., 2019; Thatcher & Zhu, 2006). In response,

coworking spaces have emerged to help re‐embody a work experience that digital and

information communication technologies have heavily virtualised (Aroles et al., 2020; Endrissat

& Leclercq‐Vandelannoitte, 2021; Hampton & Gupta, 2008; Turkle, 1996).

Prior research on coworking has adopted a community lens (Butcher, 2018; Garrett

et al., 2017; Merkel, 2015) to address the question of ‘who are we?’Our new identity lens of

coworking instead asks ‘who am I?’We seek to understand if and how coworking spaces help

members express their sense of professional identity? More precisely, our study explores how

coworking environments help individuals anchor their professional identities in the new

economy.

To address our research question, we studied a large chain of coworking spaces in the

United States. In the course of a broader research study conducted with this operator between

2017 and 2019, we surveyed new members about how the experience of working in the space

factors into their professional identity. Going beyond ‘who am I’(Albert et al., 2000), we argue

that coworking helps people answer the question, ‘who am I as a working professional and how

do I signal that to others?’In doing so, we apply a critical perspective that adds nuance to

coworking's more typical ‘celebratory framework’(Endrissat & Leclercq‐Vandelannoitte, 2021,

p. 4) that packages and markets a work experience mutually constituted by the efforts of the

participants themselves. Not every coworker chooses to work in a coworking space. Some

coworkers work from spaces that their employers occupy or whose cost of membership is

subsidised as a condition of employment. For these individuals, the organisation for which they

work seeks to buy into a certain professional image associated with coworking, which may or

may not imprint on the professional identity of the individual member.

Our findings suggest that coworking spaces fulfil more than just a practical need for a

productive workspace. They serve as places that physically and spatially ground members and

the organisations they work for while giving their work embodiment and tangibility amidst an

increasingly disembodied and virtual world of work. These places help individuals construct

and signal a professional identity, which helps them enhance their reputation as professionals

in the new economy. Our paper describes the attributes of coworking that enable this

grounding to happen, and it describes the processes used by workers who engage these

attributes to express their professional and organisational selves. By conceptualising coworking

spaces as identity anchoring environments, and by showing how members use features of the

spaces to ground their professional identities, we contribute to research on identity workspaces

and holding environments in the new economy.

The new economy's impact on professional identity

The new economy has complicated the ways in which people shape and express their professional

identity (Ahuja et al., 2020; Barley & Kunda, 2006;Cazaetal.,2017; Petriglieri et al., 2019;

Raghuram et al., 2019; Thatcher & Zhu, 2006), defined as a person's self‐conceptualisation about

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