The Hub Halifax : a qualitative study on coworking

Abstract

This paper is an explorative study into coworking. Coworking is a relatively new business service model, which has been rapidly expanding in recent years. Little academic research has been completed on the definition and composition of coworking spaces around the world, and the businesses that use them. This work examined existing academic literature, traditional media, and social media sources to assess the roots of coworking in the larger socio-economic sphere, and the current incarnations and general conceptualization of coworking spaces. An exploratory study of a coworking site in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada was conducted through one-on-one interviews with two owners and five members. The results of the interviews were examined for themes and their consistency with the literature to date. It was found that there are different models for coworking across North America. The Hub-Halifax is focused on networking and the connections and partnerships that can form in its open-concept office environment. In general, the owners and the users of the Hub-Halifax agreed with the literature that coworking decreases isolation, offers networking opportunities, intrinsically supports bootstrapping functions, and assists with ideation and productivity. They also agreed that the coworking space could be improved: it can be noisy, there is demand for more amenities, and privacy and security can be an issue. These interviews also uncovered some other themes not covered in the current literature. One was age: whether this method of working was more intuitive for younger people. Another was the possibility that coworking could function as a platform for social engineering and activism through leveraging its networking capabilities to fully engage with the community, positively affecting the economic viability of the local area.