Coworking’s Cooperation Paradox: On the Role of Stigmergic Curation

Coworking is a complex social phenomenon that draws together the material design features of office environments with a collection of practices that encourage interaction and cooperation between independent knowledge workers. While early studies highlighted social interaction and a sense of community as a primary source of value for the “first wave” of Coworkers, subsequent analyses observed diminished interactions and faltering solidarity as the Coworking industry expanded, and individual sites changed, as it entered a “second wave.” More recently, scholars have discussed a fledgling “third wave” of Coworking that seeks to revive the early forms of communal sociality, grounded in more sustainable models of enterprise. This chapter responds to this recent turn, by critically examining the role of stigmergic properties and practices among the first wave of Coworking spaces. Stigmergy is a concept first developed to explain the apparent “cooperation paradox” between social insects that describes how agents communicate indirectly by encoding signals in their environment that direct the actions of other agents. We discuss stigmergy in the context of empirical material gathered through ethnographic fieldwork conducted over 4 years among two pioneering, first wave Coworking sites in Melbourne, Australia. We demonstrate how stigmergic properties of the physical and digital environments, and the stigmergic practices of participants, enabled Coworkers to share information and learn about each other’s interests and work. We close with a brief discussion of the implications of our analysis for ongoing debates regarding the future of Coworking as a distinct, community-driven, and self-organizable practice.