Abstract
Although it has been argued that digital technology liberates workers from spatial constraints, the materiality of physical space still matters in the new economy. In this article I emphasize the importance of place in the digital age by highlighting the growth of coworking spaces where small startups, telecommuters, and freelancers rent flexible office space on a month-to-month basis. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Manhattan to show how coworking participants make use of these spaces as social and spatial resources for mobile work. Coworking spaces rely on aesthetics, ideology, and style to brand their workspaces to members while promoting new-economy work as meaningful, collaborative, creative, and fun. Recent years have given rise to the audience segmentation of the coworking marketplace as competitors target niche communities underserved by more mainstream offerings, while others attempt to repurpose otherwise underutilized commercial spaces into revenue-generating coworking ventures. The rapid expansion of coworking in places like Manhattan exemplifies how digitization has reshaped the uses of urban space around mobile work in the new economy.
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Notes
The US self-employment rate has actually declined in the past several years, largely due to an overall decrease in agricultural employment and the viability of small farms (Hipple and Hammond 2016).
These figures are somewhat contested among labor economists. Katz and Krueger (2016) estimate the number of US independent contractors to be slightly higher, totaling 8.4% of the American workforce in 2015; on the discrepancy between this NBER figure and those reported by the 2017 BLS report, see Casselman (2018). At the same time, there may also be some overlap between the BLS figures for independent contractors and self-employed workers.
One might hypothesize that the number of US independent contractors has been greatly impacted by the emergence of the online gig economy. However, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (2018f), monthly participation on online labor platforms such as Uber and Lyft only account for one percent of total workforce participation, or 1.6 million workers.
In addition to small startups, telecommuters, and self-employed freelancers, established corporations such as General Electric, IBM, Microsoft, Merck, KPMG, and HSBC have begun subleasing local offices and buying up memberships in urban coworking spaces in global cities like New York, Boston, and Hong Kong in order to manage an increasingly mobile workforce in a flexible economy (Clark 2016; Putzier 2017).
There exists an interesting tension expressed in Hill et al. (2014) and Isaacson (2014)—and also in the branding of new economy ventures such as coworking spaces more generally—between the lionization and hero worship of iconic solitary figures like Einstein and the simultaneous acknowledgment that scientific research and technological innovation is an inherently social, collaborative, and organizational enterprise (Latour 1987; Collins 1998; Peterson 2015).
While all human labor requires an obvious level of creativity and could potentially constitute artmaking, such claims made on behalf on certain work activities may be more or less contested in public by industry boosters, art critics, cultural authorities, intellectuals, and various audiences (Becker 1982). Claims to creativity and artistic accomplishment made on behalf of technology workers employed in the new economy include Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) and Vikram Chandra’s Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty (2014). On the fusion of science and art in data visualization, see Tufte (1990, 2006); Healy (2018).
The gendered role of the community manager in coworking spaces is thus similar to that of hype-girls at parties, cheerleaders at sports events, and bartenders, servers, and reality marketers in urban nightlife establishments (Grazian 2008).
The male members who rent out dedicated desks at WeWork’s Soho West location cover them with their own personalized sets of masculine signifiers: superhero action figures such as Captain America and the Hulk, twelve-packs of beer, cans of Red Bull energy drink, bottles of whiskey and hot sauce, and jumbo containers of protein powder.
This is hardly an anomaly among digital startups. It has been widely reported that female workers experience sexism and uncomfortable gender dynamics in the digital technology industry more generally (Mundy 2017; Kolhatkar 2017; Carrigan 2018; Chang 2018), and in recent years Twitter, Facebook, and Microsoft have all been sued for gender discrimination (Lapowsky 2015; O’Brien 2015). These gender dynamics are reflected in the low numbers of women hired by tech firms. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (2017), women only make up 22% of the technology workforce. Although Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg (2013) urges professional women to seek empowerment at work in her bestselling book Lean In, only 31% of Facebook employees are women, while men make up 85% of Facebook’s technical workforce and 77% of all senior-level management positions (Goel 2014).
Other community nonprofits operating out of WeWork’s Harlem location include Deed Driven Dads, which provides encouragement and support to local fathers to help them take on larger parenting roles in their children’s lives; Renaissance Church, a nondenominational Christian church based in Harlem; Classical Theater of Harlem, a diverse theater company that provides theater-based training and live theater experiences to Harlem youth and their families through its arts education program; and finally, Start Small Think Big, which offers legal, financial, and marketing services to under-resourced minority- and women-owned small businesses in New York.
In addition to their publicly accessible lobbies, many contemporary luxury hotels and high-end apartment buildings in Manhattan and elsewhere offer more exclusive access to in-house coworking spaces to their guests and residents (Velsey 2017).
It is also conceivable that dining rooms repurposed as coworking spaces discourage interaction among guests because of prevailing norms of civil inattention among nonacquaintances that undergird the public interaction order within restaurants more generally (Goffman 1963).
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Acknowledgements
Funding was graciously provided by the University Research Foundation of the University of Pennsylvania. I give thanks to Meredith Broussard, Sharon Zukin, and a set of anonymous reviewers at Theory & Society for their helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this article, as well as participating audiences at talks given to the Department of Sociology at CUNY Graduate Center, the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, the Culture, Ethnography, and Interaction Workshop at Penn, the Urban Ethnography Workshop at Yale, and the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association and the Eastern Sociological Society.
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Grazian, D. Thank God it’s Monday: Manhattan coworking spaces in the new economy. Theor Soc 49, 991–1019 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-019-09360-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-019-09360-6