Do coworking spaces promise a revolution or spark revenge? A Foucauldian spatio-material approach to the re-spatialization of remote work in coworking spaces

Aurelie Leclercq-Vandelannoitte

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Abstract: Beyond virtualization and anytime-anywhere rhetoric, the movement toward the "respatialization" of work in various workplaces and new spaces for work, such as third workspaces, results in hybridation. This spatial reconfiguration of work has been poorly theorized, failing to address the meaning and implications of such re-spatialization of work and its consequent re-regulation. This study focuses on the re-spatialization and re-regulation of remote work in coworking spaces, increasingly used by companies to rematerialize the activity of their remote employees. In contextualizing this re-spatialization according to organizational politics, this chapter proposes a symbolic/narrative, material, and experienced tryptic, based on the thought of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. This framework supports an investigation of the re-spatialization of work along three dimensions (discursive construction, instrumental materialization, and embodied experience). An illustrative vignette applies this framework to an example of a real company that has encouraged a policy of part-time work in coworking spaces for remote knowledge workers. The case shows how the re-spatialization (using coworking spaces as business centers) produces a specific disciplinarization of managerial norms. These findings suggest the need to rethink the relations among organizational space, materiality, and management control in a workspace hybridation context. In particular, this essay challenges the conventional contrast of corporate and coworking values, by showing that coworking spaces sometimes implicitly materialize business values.

Keywords: despatialization-respatialization; hybridation; re-regulation of work; rematerialization; remote work; coworking space; Michel Foucault (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-02-23
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-03330208
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Published in Nathalie Mitev (éd.). New Ways of Working - Organizations and Organizing in the Digital Age, Palgrave McMillan, pp.151-173, 2021

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