Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
41st European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) Colloquium, Athens, Yunanistan, 3 - 05 Temmuz 2025, (Tam Metin Bildiri)
Coworking spaces (CWS) have emerged as pivotal sites in contemporary work
practices, offering flexible environments for diverse groups such as freelancers,
entrepreneurs, remote workers, and employees of incumbent firms (Bouncken et al.,
2020). CWS, where numerous diverse companies share a physical environment with
no rigid boundaries, enable proximity and interaction, resulting in a vibrant hub where
informal exchanges, collaboration, and knowledge sharing can thrive. The absence of
strict physical separateness encourages spontaneous and serendipitous interactions,
with the exposure to the activities, conversations, and ideas of other entities in the
space often sparking unintentional insights and learning. The literature underscores
the role of community and collaboration within these spaces, where curated
relationships and managed dynamics foster innovation and knowledge exchange
(Yacoub & Haefliger, 2022; Bouncken et al., 2018; Spinuzzi, 2012). As part of
innovation ecosystems, CWS facilitate entrepreneurial activities, serving as a hub for
startups, knowledge sharing, and creative synergies (Capdevila, 2015; Avdikos &
Merkel, 2020).
The co-location of diverse members from different organizations fosters
informal interactions, which emerge through unplanned connections and relationships
(Blagoev et al., 2019). While analyzing such interactions and emerging practices is
crucial to understanding the dynamics within CWS, extant research literature
predominantly focuses on independent and entrepreneurial actors (Johns et al., 2024),
often overlooking the unique experiences of employees from tenant firms. Howell
(2022) notes that founders who create their own ventures and employees who work in
these ventures are different in many ways. Since founders are more emotionally
invested in their ventures, the impromptu interactions and community in CWS are a
welcome relief and a source of literal ideas and tactics, whereas the employees do not
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rely on the community as much (Howell, 2022). Accordingly, this research seeks to
answer the question: How do the role positions of different organizational actors
influence the emergence of informal social and material interactions?
To address this question, we conducted a qualitative inductive study (Corbin &
Strauss, 2008) in a university-affiliated coworking space. The coworking space hosts
technology startups from diverse verticals, where founders, co-founders, and
employees share a boundaryless office environment. This unique setting offers fertile
grounds for examining our focal inquiry into the dynamics of coworking interactions
from the perspectives of founders and their employees. Adopting a sociomateriality
perspective (Leonardi, 2013), we explore the interplay between incumbent
organizational actors and the materiality of the coworking space, shedding light on
how these interactions shape creative and collaborative practices.