Abstract
In recent times, with the rise of freelancing, there has been a spectacular global growth in co-working and co-work spaces. In an era when neoliberalism and digital communications threaten to disperse and isolate immaterial labourers, the rise of co-working demonstrates the residual power of modernist work habits, such as the desire to separate the public and private, and to be part of a workplace community. This chapter explores the emergence of co-working as both a discursive category and a concrete social arrangement. It draws on data from interviews with convenors of independent co-work spaces in three cities—Ho Chi Minh City, Sydney and Reykjavik—and argues that those who set up and convene such spaces do so not primarily for economic reasons, but from a genuine commitment to the ethical principles of co-working: collaboration, mentorship and skill-sharing. However, co-work centres also provide creative workers who own or are employed in such centres with a ‘side-hustle’, allowing them to both diversify their working lives and supplement their precarious incomes as freelancers. Thus, for these people, co-working becomes part of the improvised pathway of the creative career.
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Notes
- 1.
At the time of writing (late 2019), there were media reports that WeWork was in financial difficulties. The company’s planned public float was cancelled and the Chief Executive Officer stood down, in response to suggestion the company had leased too much metropolitan office space and was not attracting enough business (Rushe 2019).
- 2.
Confidentiality was a condition of the ethics provisions underpinning this study; therefore, pseudonyms are used here to refer to the three case study locations.
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Morgan, G. (2020). ‘Meaning and Soul’: Co-working, Creative Career and Independent Co-work Spaces. In: Taylor, S., Luckman, S. (eds) Pathways into Creative Working Lives. Creative Working Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38246-9_8
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