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Manuscript accepted for the publication in Journal of Corporate Real Estate
Classifying changes. A taxonomy of contemporary coworking spaces.
Marko Orel, PhD
Corresponding Author Department of Entrepreneurship, Prague University of Economics and
Business nám. Winstona Churchilla 1938/4, 130 67 Praha 3-Žižkov, Czechia marko.orel@vse.cz,
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1931-7310
Will Bennis, PhD
Department of Entrepreneurship, Prague University of Economics and Business nám. Winstona
Churchilla 1938/4, 130 67 Praha 3-Žižkov
2
Classifying changes. A taxonomy of contemporary coworking spaces.
Structured abstract
Purpose
During the last decade, the coworking concept has expanded and evolved along with the
industry associated with it, so that references to coworking often refer to notions quite distinct
from the original conception. The purpose of the following paper is an attempt to establish a
classification of contemporary coworking environments and clarify the scholarly as well as the
industry usage of a coworking model.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper reviews popular and scientific literature and the authors’ field experience in the
industry to derive three defining features of coworking and distinct categories that help clarify
the concept and can be used to identify and evaluate coworking spaces.
Findings
The main finding behind the following paper is the taxonomy of contemporary coworking spaces that
a) takes into account the broad spectrum of shared workspaces that commonly receive the coworking
label, b) specifies the features required to warrant that label, and c) provides a framework for
understanding the defining factors of a coworking model. The taxonomy showcases four unalike
types of coworking spaces and the three types of non-coworking shared offices that are repeatedly
and somewhat mistakenly labelled as coworking environments.
Originality
Understanding the core differentiation between unalike models would enable scholars to guide and
structure the study to evolve in coworking research. The taxonomy can be seen as a base for further
research in the field of coworking that (a) helps ensure scholars are sufficiently specific and
distinctive in the shared subject of their research, (b) suggests a roadmap for future coworking
research, and (c) provides a tool to evaluate real-world examples of work environments concerning
the degree they fit the coworking concept.
Keywords: coworking; serviced offices; third places; taxonomy.
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Introduction
The first contemporary coworking spaces opened between 2005 and 2006 (de Peuter et
al., 2017), although similar open, collaborative offices that did not use the coworking label
opened in the first years of the 1990s (Orel and Dvouletý, 2020). The original type of coworking
spaces are open offices targeting location-independent professionals—such as remote workers
(Bueno et al., 2018; Ross and Ressia, 2015) and freelancers (Jakonen et al., 2017; Merkel, 2015;
Spinuzzi, 2012) keen to become part of cooperative work culture (Akhavan, el., 2019). By the
end of 2017, the number of coworking spaces had grown from approximately 14 spaces in 2007
to approximately 11,790 spaces worldwide (GCUC & Emergent Research, 2017).
With the 21st-century economy increasingly knowledge- and innovation-based (Oh et al.,
2016), and increasingly centred in dense urban areas (Jamal, 2018), the coworking industry has
undergone rapid growth, and what counts as coworking has changed. As Emergent Research
(King, 2018) notes in explaining why they stopped doing an annual forecast of coworking
growth in 2017 after nine consecutive years: “We are no longer sure how to define coworking in
a way that allows us to do a meaningful forecast… There is a lot of confusion around what is and
is not coworking”. In other words – it was entirely clear what type of coworking spaces could be
classified as coworking spaces. While the latter goes for the King’s research on coworking
spaces and their count, there were a handful of attempts to classify coworking spaces. Weijs-
Perrée et al. (2016), for example, done so by analyzing and subsequently understanding the
varied infrastructure and classified unalike shared offices into the category of business centers,
serviced offices, coworking office and incubators.
However, these general classifications still do not share comprehensive understanding
about how coworking spaces have hybridized over past couple of years. A large part of this
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confusion stems from two issues: (1) because coworking is a trending term, the media and many
coworking-like organizations have applied the label loosely, even when existing terms without
key features of coworking already describe such spaces, (2) as the industry has grown, so too
have several complementary industries, all of which have (a) both overlapping and distinct
features and (b) increasingly diverse and specialized offerings.
These workspaces do not directly map on to early concepts of coworking, but they also
lack a term that describes their coworking-like characteristics, and so coworking has become a
popular umbrella term. Indeed, scholars, the media, and these related businesses themselves have
come to use the coworking label to describe the much larger flexible, serviced office industry,
making it difficult to distinguish between the two (King, 2018). With intense hybridization of the
model and the emergence of various workspaces that—often dubiously—identify themselves as
coworking environments, scholarly research has become increasingly fragmented. The concept
itself is at risk of losing coherent meaning despite the business of coworking continuing to grow.
Therefore, the core purpose of this paper is to address these issues and establish a clear
distinction between different types of contemporary coworking spaces.
Research framework
In light of the outlined problem, this paper seeks to develops a taxonomy of
contemporary coworking spaces that classifies them according to necessary conditions while also
distinguishing between the original model—what we will call individual-purposed coworking
spaces— and three alternative models that account for other meaningful domains of coworking:
creation-purposed, group-purposed, and startup-purposed spaces. The taxonomy can be seen as
a base for further research in the field of coworking that (a) helps ensure scholars are sufficiently
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specific and distinctive in the shared subject of their research, (b) suggests a roadmap for future
coworking research, and (c) provides a tool to evaluate real-world examples of work
environments concerning the degree they fit the coworking concept.
The methodology used to construct this taxonomy follows: First, we conduct a narrative
historical overview (Chase, 2008; Brinkmann et al., 2014) of the coworking model as it was
conceived initially, along with a literature review of scholarship on traditional forms of
coworking. The grounded approach to treating existing literature has been pursued to determine
existing classification frameworks and related theoretical ideas by leading (coworking)
researchers. For Glaser (1998), a relevant literature search in the substantive area can be
accomplished and interlaced into the theory when there is sufficient data for constant
comparison. According to Dunne (2011), the conduct of a literature review in the substantive
area of a particular study is important at the early stage of the research process, while openly
acknowledging the importance of existing sources becomes a ground for subsequent analysis.
That leads us to the second point - we use these two analysis sources to identify key features that
all forms of the original conception of coworking have in common. This initial analysis will set
out the characteristics that define coworking, at least in its individual-focused form. The
scholarly literature on coworking has been first scanned for defining factors on the model and
examined how these have evolved. While early accounts (e.g., Spinuzzi, 2012) sought to
understand the concept of coworking as based on the level of cooperation between individual
users, later scholarly debates (e.g., Merkel, 2015; Ivaldi et al., 2018) used a wider range of
variables such as the level of engagement and the efficiency of mediation. Third, we examine
new forms of coworking that were later associated with the concept to update the original
definition.
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The authors bring their extensive background both as scholars and as coworking-business
practitioners in addition to the literature review. Although an attempt is made to let the historical
analysis and literature review speak for themselves, the authors’ background studying and
working in the industry has undoubtedly influenced the categories they find relevant and
important. Both authors have closely followed the coworking industry for a decade as
practitioners and scholars. They bring that background to inform their historical understanding
and evaluation of existing literature. It should be noted that the final system of categorization is
subjective for other reasons besides the fact that the authors have a long practical history
connected to the industry. With subjectivity being one of the limitations of the proposed
taxonomy, the other limitation should be noted in a fast-paced scholarly debate on coworking
spaces and the subsequent production of research reports that have unalike views over the core
concept of coworking.
First, alternative classifications might work to a certain extent when trying to understand
the diversity of the model. For example, one could coherently argue that cafes, libraries, and
hotel lobbies ought to be included in the coworking umbrella as these spaces increasingly target
knowledge workers and encourage various forms of social connections among participants.
Indeed, to the extent these spaces become increasingly designed for work and to promote
community and collaboration among otherwise independent clients, future iterations of a
coworking taxonomy should count them as examples of coworking.
Second, it is important to note that the industry continues to evolve. As it does so, the
current taxonomy may need to be updated or reformulated. For example, businesses that sell
some form of community—or at least social connectedness among otherwise disconnected
individuals—are springing up at an accelerated rate outside the workspace industry and for many
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of the same reasons (Gregg & Lodato, 2018), perhaps best indicated by the sharing economy
(Albinsson & Yasanthi Perera, 2012; Schor & Fitzmaurice, 2015).
Although any taxonomy will be partly subjective and will change over time, there is a
strong need for well-justified methods to categorize and distinguish coworking spaces. In the
recent past, there were a handful of attempts to classify coworking environments. Spinuzzi
(2012) sought to understand different types of coworking spaces based on the level of
collaboration between users. Merkel (2015) used Spinuzzi’s approach and further attempted to
classify coworking spaces based on the level of engagement and mediation by management
personnel. Similarly, Fuzi (2015) found that different coworking spaces offer unalike level of
moral, emotional, financial and professional support to their users and their entrepreneurial
endeavors but did not provide a precise classification. A step ahead has been made by Kojo &
Nanonen (2016), who analyzed 15 coworking spaces in Finland and identified six types of
coworking spaces within their sample, namely public offices that act as coworking environments,
third places, collaboration hubs, coworking hotels, incubators and shared studios. However, their
categorization is limited as they were using solely the parameter of the business model (non-
profit or profit) and the accessibility (public, private or semi-private) when trying to classify the
sampled coworking environments. Ivaldi et al. (2018) made their attempt to expand an
understanding of contemporary coworking spaces by classifying them into different groups but
similarly to Merkel and Spinuzzi based their classification on relational aspects of coworking
users.
While we will discuss these attempts in detail within the next section, no taxonomy exists
that (a) takes into account the broad spectrum of shared workspaces that commonly receive the
coworking label, (b) specifies the features required to warrant that label, and (c) provides a
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framework to say whether or not a shared workspace fits the coworking model. As the
subsequent discussion will show, there is a need to include several defining characteristics that
can assist us to understand the diversification of a contemporary coworking model as well as
subtypes that may emerge from the current situation around the pandemic.
The following three criteria have been used to construct the proposed taxonomy. First,
based on the authors’ experience in the field and a literature review of mainstream media, what
do people in the coworking industry associate with the coworking concept? Second, how are
scholars using the coworking term? Third, to what extent do the putative defining features of
coworking help provide useful conceptual labels that help discriminate and highlight ways
people work, rather than obfuscating it. We will attempt to fabricate a taxonomy that will
provide critical distinctions across different contemporary coworking spaces by following these
defining features.
Four Models of Coworking
Individual-Purposed Coworking Spaces: The Traditional Model
Brad Neuberg, a freelancer, found himself in a tough spot. He liked the freedom and
control that came with the freelancer lifestyle, but he missed the community and structure that
often comes with working alongside others at a traditional office. He solved his dilemma by
starting what he called coworking, where ‘independent writers, programmers, and creators come
together in the community a few days a week’, like the ‘office of a traditional corporate job’ but
among people who are not working on the same project or for the same company and with a
strong emphasis on the structure and support people can give to one another to promote healthy,
productive work (Neuberg, 2005). The San Francisco Coworking Space, using an available room
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in a feminist collective The Spiral Muse (Orel & Dvouletý, 2020), opened its doors in August
2005, the first acknowledged use of the term coworking to describe working together in a shared
workspace among unaffiliated professionals to build community and support (Neuberg, n.d.).
Depending on the level of cooperation among workspace users, Spinuzzi (2012) divided
coworking into The Good Neighbors model where participants collaborate by helping one
another on their separate projects, and The Good Partners model, where they work on joint
projects. Mediation mechanisms foster these collaborations, typically networking tools
implemented by dedicated workspace personnel. Merkel (2015) has differentiated these hosts
into two groups. Service providers focus on the physical environment, working to create a
pleasant, professional, and productive workplace, leaving the collaboration and collective
innovation up to the workspace users’ initiative. Visionary hosts focus on the social
environment, actively building community and facilitating connections among workspace users.
Workplaces with imaginative hosts, henceforth referred to as community managers, shifted their
focus to provider-driven mechanisms that promote collaboration (Capdevila, 2015). Recognizing
that facilitating some degree of community, collaboration, or other forms of social interaction
among independent users is central to coworking (Rus and Orel, 2015).
Based on the managers' role, objectives, and motivations in opening a shared workspace,
Ivaldi et al. (2018) identified four types of coworking spaces: infrastructural, relational,
networked, and welfare coworking. Infrastructural coworking spaces seek to provide optimal
workspace infrastructure and see community activities as supplementary. Relational spaces
promote knowledge sharing among workspace users. Interactions are facilitated, and the
community manager is seen as a core feature. Networked coworking spaces serve as
matchmakers, knitting relationships between workspace users and the outside world. Managers
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of these spaces identify human talent within their environment and match it with external
organizations and peers to build collaborative connections and form new projects. Finally,
welfare coworking spaces emphasize the well-being of individual users. Mediation mechanisms
are there to develop relationships, but the goal is to promote coworking-space users' comfort,
business success, and well-being.
Necessary and sufficient features of individual-purposed coworking spaces.
While there is a great deal of diversity in the above attempts to classify coworking
spaces, there are also some commonalities. These commonalities help to specify necessary and
sufficient conditions of the coworking concept at least as it fits the traditional model, allowing us
to distinguish coworking from, for example, open-plan, flexible seating corporate offices that
seek to promote collaboration and innovation among employees; or from freelancers or business
travelers working temporarily alongside one another at a café, a hotel lobby, a library, or an
airport business center without any mediated social interaction. (1) As the name implies,
coworking involves work. (2) As the name also implies, that work is alongside other people who
are also working. (3) The kind of work it involves tends to be knowledge work, activities people
might do at a traditional corporate office, but also might do remotely or on a freelance basis from
anywhere that has a table and chair, electricity, Internet, and a computer. However, these three
coworking features do not allow us to distinguish it from open-plan corporate offices or from
working by oneself alongside strangers at a café, a library, or a hotel lobby.
The final two features, however, distinguish coworking from other—non-coworking—
businesses. (4) Coworking spaces intentionally bring people together in that work environment,
whether that be through knowledge sharing, collaboration, mentorship, support, education, or—
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and perhaps most importantly—in meaningful community, where participants give to and take
from one another as part of a greater sense of group identity. That distinguishes coworking from
all the non-coworking examples just mentioned, except for work in a traditional corporate office.
Most individual users decide to work from a coworking space not only to raise productivity
(Bueno et al., 2018; Papagiannidis & Marikyan, 2019) but also to knit relations through
meaningful social interactions and to expand their personal networks (Avdikos and Iliopoulou,
2019; Blagoev et al., 2019; Brown, 2017; Garrett et al., 2014; Rus and Orel, 2015; Spinuzzi et
al., 2019; Spreitzer et al., 2017). Finally, (5) unlike work in a traditional open-plan corporate
office, coworking spaces cross-institutional and project-specific barriers by bringing people
together who would not otherwise be working together. In that way, it is a prime example of the
sharing economy (Schor and Fitzmaurice, 2015).
While the fourth and fifth features above are specifically what separates coworking from
other forms of working alongside other people—both (a) working anonymously without
community alongside others, such as in hotel lobbies or cafes, and (b) working collaboratively
with other members of the same organization as in traditional corporate offices—they are also
the features that serve to distinguish traditional coworking spaces from one another, as
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coworking spaces differ widely both with respect to how they promote social connections and in
terms of the extent to which coworkers are independent from one another.
1
With that in mind, we are ready to make a first attempt at providing a taxonomy of
contemporary coworking space, starting with the three dimensions mentioned above as defining
features, and followed by the four distinct types of coworking spaces to provide key distinctions
across different types of spaces (see Table 1). Coworking spaces are in its core work-purposed
environments that support various types and degrees of social connectivity among entities that
would not otherwise be connected if not for the physical and social support provided by the
coworking itself. Coming from these defining factors, we can initially narrow down to four main
types of coworking spaces. The first originating type is an individual-purposed coworking space
that aims to support location-and-professional independent individuals who seek a community-
based environment to interlace themselves within a supportive network.
1
Throughout the paper, we will use the term coworker to refer to people who work alongside one another
in a coworking space. That is intentionally in contrast to co-worker (with a hyphen), which refers to
people who work together for the same organization. This follows common (though by no means
universal) norms in the coworking industry itself, whereby the hyphenated form (co-working) was
intentionally altered to refer to this special kind of working alongside other people.
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Table 1. A taxonomy of contemporary coworking spaces.
Defining and Differentiating Characteristics: Coworking Spaces are…
(1) Work-
purposed environments
(2) that support a
variety of types and degrees
of social connectivity—at
either the individual-level,
the group level, or both.
(3) among entities
that would not otherwise
be connected if not for the
physical and social
support provided by the
coworking space itself.
Four Types of Coworking
Individual-
Purposed
Coworking Spaces
The original
conception of
coworking. Aimed
at individuals
rather than groups.
Location-and
professional-
independence is a
major theme, and
so support for
community
building and
otherwise
connecting
members is
common theme.
Creation-
Purposed
Coworking Spaces
Similar to
Individual-
Purposed
coworking in its
emphasis on
community and
individuals, but the
type of work is
more specialised,
does not involve
office work, and is
more likely to be a
hobby rather than a
full-time profession
such that and work-
independence are
not as central.
Group-
Purposed
Coworking
Spaces
These
spaces tend to
target groups,
including large
corporate groups,
more than
individuals, with
separate teams
having their own
offices rather than
all working
together in a single
open-plan office.
That said, they are
true to the original
conception in their
support for
connecting both
individuals and
teams across
institutions, and
part of both their
physical and social
support facilitates
the making of such
connections.
Startup-
Purposed
Coworking Spaces
Primary aim
is to promote
startup business
success. Social
connections across
institutions are
essential, but in the
specific service of
adding necessary
support or team
members to help
the business
succeed. Usually,
these spaces are
time limited and
access is
competitively
based on merit, but
other forms of
coworking may add
a startup-purposed
component for their
members without
time limits or
evaluations of
merit.
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The following sections consider other collaborative work environments that do not fit the
original model but have come to be associated with coworking and for which the term proves
useful. They expand on the original definition and make clear there are distinct meaningful
categories of coworking. They also allow us to separate some types of shared work environments
for which the coworking label would be unnecessary and misleading.
Creation-Purposed Coworking Spaces
A separate class of coworking spaces provides physical tools, material substrates, and
specialized activities to make physical things (Bergner et al., 2017). These spaces target
specialists, and they provide specialized tools and materials and training. Many of these spaces
existed before the coworking term had been coined, and they continue to grow without
necessarily applying or needing that label. Examples include makerspaces and hackerspaces
(Merkel, 2015; Bilandzic and Foth, 2016; Waters-Lynch et al., 2016), writers’ spaces (Hughes,
2015), and even collaborative commercial kitchens (e.g., Byrd, 2016). At the same time, they fit
well with what defines coworking, and most scholars include them as examples of coworking
spaces.
These spaces share the following characteristics with traditional coworking spaces: they
emphasize community, share physical resources that would be too expensive or underused by the
individual users, bring people together to work alongside one another who are not affiliated with
the same institutions, and offer some aspect of professional development, education, or support.
Rather than targeting knowledge workers, freelancers, remote workers, and other people who
traditionally might work from an office, they tend to target hobbyists, creative artists, or other
people who do not use the space as their primary source of income. Because these spaces are not
15
designed for office work but rather for the specialized needs of more narrowly defined domains,
specialized machinery and material substrates—and access to expertise on how to use that
machinery to work on those substrates—is more central to creation-purposed spaces than to the
office-based coworking alternatives.
Many of these distinctions are superficial in that they are not defining features of such
spaces. Users of these creation-purposed spaces seek community and support for many of the
same reasons that traditional coworkers do. Many traditional coworking spaces have become
specialized in ways that make them only ambiguously distinct from these other specialized
spaces that happen to have their own category names. There are coworking spaces that target
parents with young children and have child-care and meetings to provide parental support,
coworking spaces just for software developers, coworking spaces just for architects or real-estate
agents or lawyers. Even traditional office-based coworking is specialized in the sense that it
relies on the sharing of equipment that are central to the value of working from a shared space.
Nonetheless, the move from shared traditional office space to shared spaces that rely
heavily on specialized equipment in contexts that would not be called offices at all—except
euphemistically—and where most participants are hobbyists rather than full-time, paid
professionals is a departure from the original conception of coworking. The vast majority of
coworking spaces are office-based, and people looking for coworking without specifying
hackerspaces or makerspaces or some other specialized environment can expect to find office-
based coworking. Furthermore, the specialized needs and shared non-social resources often focus
on naming and marketing these collaborative workspaces since that is what makes them unique
from traditional coworking. As such, an argument could be made that creation-purposed
coworking spaces do not warrant the coworking label at all. That said, our taxonomy will include
16
these spaces in the coworking umbrella terminology because they are so often included by
scholars studying coworking spaces and, most importantly, share the characteristics that make
coworking new and unique (Appel-Meulenbroek et al., 2020).
The particular sub-category of creation-purposed coworking spaces that involve
engineering and high-tech building are themselves often divided into two subcategories (Waters-
Lynch et al., 2016) of hackerspaces (Bilandzic and Foth, 2016; Merkel, 2015) and makerspaces
(Sheridan et al., 2014). Although they are sometimes grouped into a single category (e.g.,
Barniskis 2014), the two terms have distinct histories associated with concrete differences in
what they provide. Hackerspaces are more often bottom-up (i.e., more likely to be non-profit
cooperatives run on a democratic basis) and strongly community-focused (Kera, 2012).
Makerspaces, on the other hand, are more top-down (i.e., more likely to be for-profit, corporate
entities where the company owners unilaterally make decisions, and users fees are the primary
source of income), and they tend to focus more on education and knowledge transfer for their
users (Bergner and Chen, 2018). Makerspaces tend to be less ideologically rooted in the hacker
subculture, as the name suggests, and they more often involve the construction of larger products
(think motorcycles instead of motherboards).
The characteristics that distinguish hackerspaces from makerspaces are much like the
features that indicate levels of the community in traditional coworking spaces. However, while it
is helpful to have such names, the differences are not sufficient to justify an entirely separate
coworking category. The take-home message about creation-purposed coworking spaces is that
they shift the emphasis from office-based work to more specialized types of work, and they shift
the primary focus from emphasizing the organizational autonomy of the users to highlighting the
17
tools and substrates they offer to facilitate professional—or expertise—development in their
particular work domain.
Group-Purposed Coworking Spaces
The second alternative to individual-purposed coworking is group-purposed coworking.
Recent years have seen an increase in self-described coworking spaces that target companies and
teams rather than individuals (Spreitzer et al., 2017). For these coworking spaces, the community
tends to come second to flexibility: short-term leases and the ability to grow and shrink one’s
team. Many closely related examples already existed before the coworking industry began, under
the name of executive suites or serviced offices, with the main shift from these traditional
serviced, flexible office spaces being an emphasis on community and in particular on facilitating
connections between groups and individuals not working for the same organization. In these
coworking spaces, the ‘individuals’ have been replaced by entire teams with their own separate
team offices, and the inter-institutional connections are made at the floor- or building-level or
just virtually using Internet-based social networking tools. Formal events and informal parties—
along with informal common social areas such as cafes or game rooms—connect people across
institutions, but most of the actual work is alongside people working at the same institution.
Although these spaces also have a traditional open-plan workspace for freelancers and other
individuals, that target market is secondary, adding value to the primary group clients, helping to
justify the coworking label, and filling empty seats.
On the provider side, the coworking model has increasingly become appealing to large,
corporate real estate developers in the flexible office industry that traditionally would not have
emphasized community or collaboration at all. Corporations have also embraced the coworking
18
concept (Schopfel et al., 2015). They are increasingly (a) endorsing flexible and agile product
development, (b) outsourcing their workforce to remote, short-term, freelance workers,
epitomized by the gig economy ( Lund et al., 2012; Davison, 2015; Bughin et al., 2016) or the
Hollywood model of work (Davidson, 2015) and (c) outsourcing office space to flexible, serviced
offices and coworking spaces, at least in part to facilitate a and b (Kaufman, 2014). As such, the
flexible office industry has been growing in recent years for reasons perhaps mostly independent
from coworking itself, although under the name of coworking, blurring the distinction between
the two.
Simultaneously, just as users of the traditional smaller coworking spaces seek social—not
just physical—resources, corporate users are also increasingly drawn to the social resources of
intentional community and inter-institutional collaboration that coworking emphasized from the
start and that traditional flexible office-space providers did not. Other people working at the
coworking space can outsource talent for corporate users. The short-term, often remote,
corporate team members may benefit from the local community within the coworking space not
directly connected to their corporate sponsor, perhaps thousands of miles away. Organizations
have turned to coworking to uncover alternative work scenarios, find a substitute for the
traditional corporate office, and discover innovative ways to foster co-creation with external
stakeholders (Josef and Back, 2018).
That being so, many traditional flexible office-space providers have rebranded as
coworking spaces and sought to add community building and inter-organizational collaborative
components to their value proposition (e.g., IWG, formerly Regus), and new flexible office space
providers have entered the field branding themselves as coworking spaces from day one and
emphasizing community and collaboration as a core feature (Sargent et al., 2018). The merging
19
and mutual growth of coworking and serviced, flexible office space is central to the explosive
growth of coworking but also why Emergent Research no longer conducts an annual assessment
of the rate of coworking growth referred to earlier in the paper (King, 2018), a major reason why
the development of a taxonomy of coworking spaces is currently so necessary.
With that in mind, Schopfel et al. (2015) used the term corpoworking to describe
coworking spaces for company employees that may serve as a brand showroom, creating positive
value of the employer’s brand for both the current employees impressed at the quality of their
workspace, but also for potential employees working independently at the coworking space.
Mitev et al. (2019) elaborated on the definition of corpoworking by describing it as a corporate
third space that allows company employees to mix with external entrepreneurs, innovators and
other knowledge workers. Corpoworking is, in essence, coworking, but predominantly aimed at
corporate teams and provided by large multi-national serviced office developers. Informal
networking mechanisms are generally minimized and replaced by more formal interactions
(parties, events, workshops, online internal social networks). Corpoworking is characterized by
more lavish facilities than traditional coworking spaces and it often seeks to help maintains the
tenant company’s pre-existing company culture (Bréchignac, 2016).
Existing literature offers two subtypes of group-purposed coworking. The first has been
called an open house model, in which companies offer workspace as a public amenity to non-
employees, typically for brand-building. The second subtype has been called a campsite model,
an internal, invitation-only space where teams from one company co-locate with peers from
another. At the extreme end of the second model, some group-purposed coworking space
providers have establishing stand-alone locations for individual corporations, such as UBS and
Facebook, removing one of the defining characteristics of coworking—the fact that users come
20
from different organizations—but nonetheless adding something new and coworking-like to
traditional outsourced serviced offices: facilitating community and collaboration (Nagy and
Lindsay, 2018). The main distinction between office coworking spaces that primarily target
individual, location-independent workers in open spaces (the traditional, individual-purposed
coworking spaces) and those that primarily target corporate teams in offices that are segregated
from other users of the space (group-purposed coworking) and have an added-value but less
central focus on community building and networking across organizations, provides a major and
useful distinction between kinds of coworking spaces that should help structure the development
of a taxonomy of coworking spaces.
As with creation-purposed coworking spaces, a reasonable argument could be made that
group-purposed coworking spaces should not be called coworking at all. In most cases the
primary focus is flexible office space, and both community facilitation and inter-institutional
interactions are often at a minimum. A meaningful change has taken place in the flexible office
industry, where both community and inter-organizational collaboration has become a central
selling point that corresponds well to traditional coworking spaces for individual users. There
was no previously existing terminology to describe this phenomenon, as it came into being after
individual-purposed coworking was already established. Since this industry is far larger in terms
of media attention and financial value and has embraced the coworking label to describe this
shift toward community and inter-institutional cooperation, it is useful to add it to the coworking
umbrella. While still recognizing it has distinct characteristics from traditional coworking, where
facilitating community across institutions has primacy and the fact that clients are individuals
rather than teams is why that kind of community is so important. The take-home message is that
group-purposed coworking spaces must promote social interactions across institutions to earn the
21
coworking title (otherwise, they are just outsourced, flexible, serviced offices)— and many of
them do. They differ from traditional individual-purposed coworking spaces in their level of
organization (interconnecting distinct corporate groups along with individuals), and as a
consequence, they tend to also differ in their relative emphasis on both community and inter-
organizational interaction (tending to emphasize both less than would a traditional coworking
space).
Startup-Purposed Coworking Spaces
The third and final alternative to traditional individual-purposed coworking spaces are
startup-purposed spaces. They target start-up teams or individuals who need help turning their
idea or fledgling business into successful start-ups. They go under the names of incubators,
accelerators, or university innovation spaces. Like the other coworking models, they emphasize
inter-institutional cooperation, bringing together mentors, investors, and helping to connect
early-stage entrepreneurs with expert team members who can help bring a great idea or
technology to fruition, as well as providing collaborative workspace where different start-up
teams can interact and have access to freelancers who might join the teams, either to solve a
short-term problem or as founding employees. Avdikos and Merkel (2019) recognize startup-
purposed coworking spaces by dividing coworking environments into two general types with
their Entrepreneurial-led coworking spaces embedded in the start-up ecosystem and aiming to
support business growth and distinguishing it from community-led coworking spaces, which
maps onto this paper’s individual-purposed category. Ivaldi et al. (2018) Networked Coworking
similarly recognizes incubator- and accelerator-type collaborative workspaces as coworking.
22
That said, startup-purposed coworking spaces have many distinct features that make clear
that they do not quite fit in any of the other three categories of coworking and are different from
the original individual-purposed model. First, although these spaces usually take the form of
‘office coworking’, that is not necessary. Just as creation-purposed coworking spaces—such as
hackerspaces and makerspaces—make up a small minority of community-oriented coworking
spaces (GCUC & Emergent Research, 2017), they also exist in the startup-purposed coworking
space domain, but in small enough numbers one might not notice. Skanska’s property technology
accelerator (Skanska, n.d.), the many biotech incubators and accelerators (Waters-Lynch et al.,
2016), and food industry incubators and accelerators are examples. Like group-purposed
corpoworking, incubators and accelerators often target teams—albeit less well-formed start-up
teams that they often help build—and the community they promote is not the kind that Brad
Neuberg sought when starting his San Francisco Coworking space, but is rather the kind of
investment and mentorship necessary to build a successful business. They do not promote
location or work independence, often requiring start-ups to give up a great deal of their
independence and move far from home to join the space. Most importantly, these spaces'
coworking component is often secondary to their aim to promote entrepreneurial success and
ultimately create financial value in ways that are not so central to traditional individual-purposed
coworking spaces.
Start-up incubators and business accelerators tend to differ from one another in a few
important ways (Waters-Lynch et al., 2016). Accelerators trade their mentorship and help for
partial ownership of the businesses they are accelerating. That is because business accelerators
are backed by investors hoping to make significant money out of their investment into these
companies in exchange for the money, time, and connections they provide. Incubators are far
23
more likely to function in a non-profit capacity to promote entrepreneurship, innovation, and
small business success for its own sake. Without a profit-motive, they rely on external sources of
funding. Indeed, they are often direct government mandates to help support innovation and
business growth regionally, or university-based centers, helping students transition from theory
to applied business success.
These spaces’ physical infrastructure often functions identically to other office-type
coworking (traditional coworking spaces or corpoworking), since they require a good shared
office to function effectively as business incubators or accelerators and benefit from them
connecting people outside the individual start-up teams they support. Indeed, they often fill their
extra available seating by marketing those extra seats as a coworking space. Unlike other forms
of coworking, however, mentorship, funding, and connecting members to external expertise and
investors are the key purpose of these spaces, and coworking just serves as a means to an end.
Summary of the Four Models of Coworking
Traditional—individual-purposed—coworking spaces involve the coming together of
freelancers, remote workers, and other location-independent professionals to work alongside one
another in an open-plan office environment. Unlike working from cafes or hotel lobbies, social
interactions and some level of community creation with other people working in the space is part
of their reason for being a regular user of an individual-purposed coworking space. Moreover,
unlike working on the same project with people from the same organization, work independence
and inter-institutional collaboration are intentionally supported. Creation-purposed coworking
spaces remove the requirement for office-based work and fill a niche for more specialized
24
coworking spaces. Group-purposed coworking spaces target teams rather than individuals,
removing the location-independent and the individual-focus while still emphasizing community
across non-affiliated entities, but where the entities are entire teams rather than just individuals.
While this shift has tended to make community and inter-institutional interactions less central to
the coworking concept, that’s not inherent to the shift. Finally, startup-purposed coworking
spaces emphasize mentorship and access to expertise and funding more than peer-to-peer social
connections. In particular, they help to develop a successful business and, as such, they are
intended for temporary support.
These extensions to the coworking concept suggest a reframing of the necessary and
sufficient conditions of coworking to the following:
(1) Coworking spaces must be work-purposed environments, although how specialized or
general that workplace environment is varies widely.
(2) Some degree of support for social interaction among coworkers is integral to the
coworking concept, although the extent of that social interaction and whether or not it
entails an open-plan office work environment varies widely depending on the particular
coworking environments.
(3) Some degree of inter-institutional social interaction is also integral to the coworking
concept, but whether or not that interaction is at the level of the individual, or at the level
of the group again varies across coworking environments.
Note that while (1) work-purposed environment, (2) support for social interaction, and (3)
inter-institutional relationships are all necessary to the coworking concept, there is also a wide
degree of variation across styles of coworking. Concerning work-purposed environment, there
25
are two key sub-variables: (a) the degree of specialization and (b) the extent to which the space is
well-designed for the kind of work being done there. Both aspects vary widely across coworking
spaces. Some spaces intentionally promote professional diversity (Waters-Lynch and Potts,
2017), while others are specialized both for the profession and for the tools and materials
provided (Bouncken and Reuschl, 2018; Waters-Lynch et al., 2016). Some spaces are only
incidentally coworking spaces, such as Jellies, informal coworking meetups, which might take
place in a friend’s living room or in a café (Orel & Dvouletý, 2020), while other examples of
coworking take place in highly specialized and costly environments specifically created to
promote the specialized kind of work being done.
With respect to support for social interaction, environments vary in terms of (a) how
actively they support such interactions, with some spaces relying entirely on bottom-up, user-to-
user initiated contact and other spaces employing community managers whose mandate it is to
promote connections among users (Castilho and Quandt, 2017; Ivaldi et al., 2018; Merkel, 2015),
(b) the kinds of connections coworking spaces help make, from peer-to-peer horizontal
connections, to more vertical connections, such as from community managers with the mandate
to help connect users with one another, or with investors or mentors or teachers with the mandate
to help business success, (c) the formality of the connections, from those that are business
related, to those that are educational and classroom based, to casual social get togethers, (d) the
depth of the social connections, from merely emphasizing social proximity, to facilitating social
encounters, to seeking to create a meaningful community based on shared values and a personal
commitments to sacrifice of oneself for the group as a whole, (e) the extent of collaboration,
from mere water-cooler talk, to active knowledge and expertise sharing, to employment, to
business partnerships, (f) physical design features of the space that promote social interaction,
26
from providing workspaces in open-plan offices versus private individual offices versus
sequestered group offices, to providing common social areas like game rooms or cafés.
Concerning inter-institutional relationships, coworking spaces again vary widely. Some spaces
involve work primarily with members of the same team and only occasionally interact with
external groups, primarily as a means to outsource, while others intentionally promote contact
with unaffiliated others because the intention is to maintain autonomy with one’s work while still
having the community benefits of a traditional workplace, as in individual-purposed coworking
spaces.
Note that while one aspect of the first of these three dimensions (i.e., the degree of
specialization of the coworking space) is arguably neutral for its implication for whether or not
the space warrants the coworking label, the rest are not. Coworking spaces can be either
specialized or more heterogenous, intentionally targeting people from different professions and
backgrounds. There are reasonable arguments that either extreme might better represent
coworking, with homogeneity promoting a stronger community and enabling easier collaboration
(Bouncken and Reuschl, 2018). In contrast, heterogeneity promotes the diversity and openness
that early coworking founders embraced as a core coworking value (Rus and Orel, 2015), and
that might seem to naturally fit with the institutional independence emphasized with traditional
individual-purposed coworking, where maintaining autonomy from often bureaucratic or
dysfunctional corporate culture was part of the motivating force behind the movement (Neuberg,
2005).
That said, (1) the extent to which the physical work environment is well-suited for the
work conducted there; (2) the extent of support for social relationships, and (3) the degree to
which those relationships are inter-institutional (or alternatively, the extent of within-
27
institutional independence) are all defining features of coworking whereby the higher the rating,
the better a particular workspace fits to the coworking concept, and for which there is
considerable variation across coworking spaces. In other words - if a work environment makes
effective work impossible, if social interaction is not supported in any intentional way, or if
everyone is working on the same project for the same company, the coworking label cannot be
applied to the selected workspace.
Discussion & Conclusion: A Taxonomy of Coworking Spaces
How might this taxonomy be used? Mainly to help explore empirically (1) which
indicator variables (e.g., presence or absence of a community manager, or open-plan office
design) and which outcome variables (e.g., partnerships created in the coworking space, or
subjective sense of community belonging) are most important to coworking-space users and
why, (2) the extent to which coworking spaces successfully provide those indicators or
outcomes, and (3) examining how experimental indicator variables affect desired outcomes (e.g.,
how the presence of a community manager promotes a sense of community belonging). Here,
coworking spaces could refer to specific individual spaces that are being studied as cases or refer
to distinct industries, such as examining how self-identified hackerspaces perform with respect to
distinct variables of social-relationship promotion. Having an initial model helps guide and
structure the research and offers immediate experimental questions and hypotheses to be tested.
Another way the taxonomy might be used both by scholars, as well as real-estate
practitioners and industry players, is to help specify what does not count as coworking, and why.
To that end, Table 2 presents a first attempt at a taxonomy of non-coworking shared-office
environments that have sometimes been called coworking, but that the current paper contends
28
should not be, because applying the coworking label would confuse the concept and would be
more misleading than informative as to what these spaces provide.
Table 2. Non-coworking shared offices.
Defining Characteristics
(1) Work-
purposed
environments
(2) where
people work
alongside one
another—at either
the individual-level,
the group level, or
both—but where…
either (a)
there is no bottom-
up or top-down
support for making
meaningful social
connections,
or (b) that
support is entirely
limited to
individuals or
groups working
within a single
institution or on a
single project
Three Types of Non-Coworking Shared Offices
Community-
Washing
Shared Workspaces
Shared workspaces
that call themselves
coworking spaces and / or
claim to promote
community or other forms of
social connections among
members, but that do not
promote such connections,
either in bottom-up or top
town ways. Examples
include many traditional
executive suite operators
that provide open space
work areas for unaffiliated
individuals as they always
have, but for the sake of cost
savings and flexibility.
Community-
Facilitating
Single-Entity Workspaces
These are not
actually shared workspaces
in that the people working
there are all part of the same
team, whether they are
employees or temporarily
outsourced professionals.
Yet they are similar to
coworking in that they
embrace the ideal of
building a sense of
community in the open-plan
office, they often provide no
fixed seating for users, and
they may look to coworking
models to help promote their
sense of community, even in
some cases outsourcing their
entire office-space services
to traditional corpoworking
entities, but not shared with
other institutions (Nagy &
Lindsay, 2018).
Authentic
Shared Workspaces
Many shared
workspaces target clients
who are looking for a
convenient place to work
and do not mind sitting
alongside other people, or
maybe even prefer that
social presence. These
spaces provide office
infrastructure but do not
promoting social interaction
among users who were not
already connected in the
first place. They provide a
real service for people not
seeking social support.
Examples include cafes,
libraries, open-work spaces
in traditional executive
suites, hotel lobbies or
airport terminals, or laptop-
friendly cafes and
restaurants, among other
places.
29
Shared office providers call themselves coworking spaces and make claims about
supporting networking, community, or other kinds of social connectedness, but that does not
support social connections and are using what we call community-washing to misrepresent what
they offer for marketing purposes or with real but unfulfilled intention. Single-organization
offices that embrace the community- and collaboration-promoting characteristics of the
coworking industry but do so in their own isolated team offices can be lauded for trying to
improve the social quality of their open-plan offices, but such offices are simply well-managed
corporate offices and should not be mistaken for coworking spaces. High-quality open-plan
shared offices that allow users to take advantage of the sharing economy for affordable
workspace and a more professional public presence are commendable for providing a much-
needed service.
Finally, there is a need for a future debate and further scholarly research. Along with
pointing the way for new questions and hypotheses in coworking scholarship, and as well as
helping define what coworking is not, it should be noted that the proposed model is just a first
step, a model for the development of a rich taxonomy representing the ecosystem of real-world
coworking spaces. Where does one’s family home office fit for its status as a coworking space?
Where do corpoworking centers belong as compared to traditional coworking spaces? How will
these spaces change and (re)shape in the post-pandemic world? Will individual-purposed
coworking space again see the rise to the newly enlarged class of remote workers? With that in
mind, we propose creating an annual review of coworking spaces—much as U.S. News and
World Reports gives a yearly review of colleges (Bowman and Bastedo, 2009)—might be a
reasonable endeavor. Alternatively, the model could be used to create a coworking certification
program in the same vein as the organic label or LEED Certification (Matisoff et al., 2014). A
30
standardized certification program could clear the confusion both for consumers as well for the
investors who would have the possibility to have a clear understanding what coworking space are
about to use or invest in. That said, with transparency and care, such rating systems are often all
we have to make an informed decision, and they go a long way toward illuminating what
otherwise may have remained an opaque and poorly defined domain.
31
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