‘A home for radical innovators’: The private sociality
and materiality of immaterial labour in Amsterdam
Simone van DijkUniversity of Amsterdam Abstract
This paper brings together the notions of the immateriality of post-Fordist labour and the spatial materialization of new work socialities. Such ‘network socialities’, drawn upon by mobile, flexible workers in their productive labour, are materialized in spaces of new work. This study uses ethnographic material collected in Spring House, a coworking space in Amsterdam, to answer the question how socialities of immaterial labour find their material translation in space. It shows how an exclusive, professional sociality is constructed on the basis of a public claim and how this sociality finds its daily expression in very private social practices and materialities. This intense privatization of work then is argued to obscure the blur between work and private life. Moreover, this case study shows how the privatization of the socialities and materialities of immaterial labour may have an exclusionary effect.
Keywords
Immaterial labour, space, network sociality, materiality, exclusion, privatization
Simone van Dijk, 10290060 Master thesis Research Master Social Sciences University of Amsterdam 7 July 2017, Amsterdam Supervisor: dr. M.A. (Marguerite) van den Berg Second reader: mw. prof. dr. G.M.M. (Giselinde) Kuipers
Introduction
“The origin of the concept was twofold. We started with the idea of a flexible workplace, very service oriented. Second, we wanted to create the feeling of coming home; the feeling of a new community, of family. What would it be like to combine a flexible workplace with a clubhouse? That was our ambition and intention: bringing those two dynamics together. Flexible working, forming a community, and sharing knowledge: all combined together in one house.”
This quote comes from a short video in which one of the founders of Spring House, a ‘coworking space’ or self-proclaimed ‘members club for innovators’ in Amsterdam, spells out her original ambitions for the space. She expresses two main objectives. On the one hand, she aspires to establish a workplace. On the other hand, she expresses the objective to create a ‘home-like’ clubhouse, where a sense of community, ‘family’ even, is fostered. What these two ambitions share is the space in which they are joined: ‘together in one house’. Having conducted ethnographic research in Spring House, I noticed that this focus on creating a familial togetherness and a domestic materiality came back time and again. On an average day in ‘the house’, while some members are working on their individual projects in the ‘living room area’, sipping on a cappuccino, others attend the book club or work in the communal garden, while others are getting an in-house haircut or massage. All of this occurs in a space that is carefully designed to create a ‘domestic feel’, an ambience that the presence of soft couches, fridges stuffed with beer and the table tennis table indeed evokes. In this sense, Spring House reflects a more general development in which the boundaries between the traditional notion of the professional ‘workplace’ and the private ‘home’ seem to fade, as “workplaces and play places blur in a haze of alcohol and stewed coffee” (Standing, 2011: 203).
In this article I aim to analyze the ambivalence between the professional instrumentalities of new workspaces on the one hand, and their focus on the incorporation of leisure and intimacy on the other hand. New workplaces such as coworking spaces are increasingly being established in urban areas in the Netherlands (van der Meer, 2016) and in cities globally, catering for people working in the ‘brave new world of work’ (Beck, 2000). Such spaces accommodate a group of flexible, mobile workers whose labour processes are increasingly organized around the production of immaterialities, a post-Fordist form of work that Maurizio Lazzarato coined ‘immaterial labour’ (1997). In contrast to the capacities required in the previous Fordist production of material commodities, the productive activities associated with immaterial labour increasingly depend on workers’ mobilization of their personal subjectivities. In other words, in the post-Fordist organization of work, “the entire person, with their knowledge and their affects, becomes part of the capitalist production process” (Lorey, 2015:83). Moreover, the flexibilization and individualization that mark the current ‘precarious’ labour market have resulted in a decreasing attachment of workers to secure working schedules and localities, causing a dependence on the mobilization of private time and spaces in work (Standing, 2011; Lorey, 2015). At the same time, as workers increasingly cope with risks individually, social networks function to reduce risk and create some form of security (Wittel, 2001). Such socialities may exist virtually, but also find a material
translation in the spatiality of new workplaces. Studying this spatiality might teach us about the unfolding of social relations characterizing new work, as “the spatial organization of society […] is integral to the production of the social, and not merely its result” (Massey, 1995: 4). Spaces in which work socialities are materialized are thus an interesting field of study: “as workers become increasingly mobile, this emphasizes the importance of studying the role which place and space have for work” (Brown & O’Hara, 2003:1585).
This article brings together the notions of the immateriality of post-Fordist labour and the spatial materialization of new work socialities. Hence, I question how the notion of immaterial labour, characterized by an individual and private attachment to work, and the material, spatial enactment of new work socialities align. Drawing on ethnographic material collected in Spring House, this study aims to answer the question: how do socialities of immaterial labour find their material translation in space?
Space in Post-Fordist Labour
Immaterial labour and the mobilization of the private
Transformations in late twentieth century capitalism, such as the development of new information and communication technologies, the growing global flow of people, new modes of governance, and the processes of economic deregulation and privatization, have resulted in new ways work is organized in the contemporary ‘flexible regime of accumulation’, Post-Fordism (Harvey, 1989), ‘new capitalism’ (Sennett, 2006) or ‘tertiary society’ (Standing, 2011). In this new organization of work, “livelihoods are pursued on economic ground that shifts rapidly underfoot, and many of our old assumptions about how people can make a living are outdated pieties” (Ross, 2009:2).
The concept of immaterial labour first coined by Lazzarato as “the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity” (1997) is useful in understanding how both the product of work and the productive activities mobilized in production processes have undergone crucial transformations. In this ‘brave new world of work’ (Beck, 2000), “the worker’s personality and subjectivity have to be made susceptible to organization and command. It is around immateriality [emphasis added] that the quality and quantity of labor are organized.” (Lazzarato, 1997:133). The product of immaterial labour is essentially a social relationship rather than a material commodity, and the content of that relationship lies in the production of subjectivity. Hence, rather than the specific skills and labour time required of workers in previous production processes, resulting in the production of materialities, this cognitive workforce mobilizes its subjectivities and affects, or ‘it’s entire self’, in the capitalist production process (Lorey, 2015). Concretely, laborers indulge in activities “not normally recognized as “work” […] involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion” (Lazzarato, 1997:132). These immaterial products form the spill of post-Fordist production. Although the production of subjectivities and social relationships might seem more obvious in some industries such as the culture or knowledge industries, “this form of productive activity is not limited only to highly skilled workers; it refers to a use value of labour power today,
and more generally, to the form of activity of every productive subject within postindustrial society” (Lazzarato, 1997:135).
In this new organization of work based on “postindustrial productive subjectivity” (ibid.), workers’ self- identity and the marketing thereof has become an important resource in establishing a position in the current labour market: “individuals work on their self as a marketable product” (Van den Berg & Arts, forthcoming) and “these times demand a subject who is capable of constant self-invention” (Walkerdine, 2003). In its productive activities, the worker is required to be flexible and depends on the mobilization of communicative and affective competences. This mobilization of the self in work results in the blurring of the boundaries between productive labour and (previously) private life. Lisa Adkins described this “continuum of moments in eventful productive activity” as “the folding of the economy into society [...], the movement of productive and value-creating activities away from the formal labor process and their dispersal across the social body” (Adkins, 2012:637). The mobilization of the previously considered private is thus required in the modern organization of labour and in this sense “life becomes inseparable from work” (Lazzarato, 1997:137).
This blur of productive labour and private life is intensified through the increasingly individualized labour market conditions that characterize work. The flexibility required of workers in this new system of value production becomes institutionalized through the insecure organization of labour, a process that has been referred to as precarization (e.g. Standing, 2011; Lorey, 2015). Precarization affects workers as it results in “the radical uncertainty of their futures, the temporary or intermittent nature of their work contracts, and their isolation from any protective framework of social insurance” (Ross, 2009:6). Initially, the group of people in society argued to experience states of precariousness was mostly considered to correspond with a class of laborers in the low-end service sectors (Standing, 2011). However, scholars and policymakers increasingly acknowledge that precarization affects not just one traditional class but affects workers across the whole labor market spectrum, with an increasing attention paid to precariousness among laborers in more ‘high-end’ labour markets such as academic professionals or creative workers working in new urban service and knowledge economies (e.g. Bousquet, 2007; Gill & Pratt, 2008; Ross, 2008; Lorey, 2009; Lorey, 2015; McRobbie, 2015). Hence, workers in low-end service jobs and workers in the high-end ‘creative class’ (Florida, 2002) increasingly share working conditions and “from everyone, regardless of gender or origins, an individualized [emphasis added] capacity for risk management is now required” (Lorey, 2015:89). This risk management requires workers to invest their previously private time into work, and as “the temporality of life becomes governed by work” (Gill & Pratt, 2008:17), the blur between productive labour and private life is enhanced.
Although this new organization of labour thus requires laborers to mobilize the very private in work, it is also characterized by a strong reliance on the forming of socialities. At the core of the production processes of immaterial labour are social relationships and “working practices become increasingly networking practices” (Wittel, 2001: 53). In a labour market in which the long-term, secure career paths in hierarchical workplaces are replaced by a mobile, project-based, informal work culture, social ‘networking’ has become increasingly crucial in securing work (Pratt, 2000; Wittel, 2001;
Jarvis & Pratt, 2006; McRobbie, 2015). Therefore, Wittel coined the form of sociality that immaterial labour processes draw upon the ‘network sociality’. A network sociality is informational, individualized, consisting of “fleeting and transient, yet iterative social relations; of ephemeral but intense encounters” and is characterized by “a combination of both work and play” (Wittel, 2001:51). The often informal and playful sociality that results from this combination of work and play then creates an interesting ambivalence with its professional instrumentality and again exemplifies how work and life increasingly blur as “this playful attitude leads to an intensification of work” (ibid: 68).
Space and materiality
Another aspect of work that has changed considerably in the move towards a post-Fordist organization of immaterial labour is how work is situated in space. The development of (portable) communication and information technologies, such as the laptop and smartphone, the increasing flexibility in time regimes and the rise in self-employment are examples of factors that have contributed to an increasing ‘nomadicity of work’ (Liegl, 2014). Although some have therefore suggested a ‘decorporealisation’ or ‘deterritorialisation’ of work, implying that work is losing its material ‘body’ or connection to things and spaces, many scholars found no evidence of such a ‘death of geography’ (Pratt, 2002; Pratt, Gill & Spelthann, 2007). For example, Brown and O’Hara found that “in many ways work was still as corporeal as ever. The mobile staff [...] still worked with things and in places, and those things and places were still of crucial importance in how they could conduct their work.” (2003:1584) Hence, the materiality and ‘situatedness’ of immaterial labour remain significant, but have been undergoing interesting changes.
Drawing on Doreen Massey’s understanding of the inherent interdependence between space and social relations, as “the spatial is social relations ‘stretched out’” (Massey, 1994: 2), studying the spatiality of new work might help to understand its social dynamics. Rather than a view of space and place as bounded, Massey argued that space is inherently dynamic and grounded in power relations, as socialities are too: “since social relations are inevitably and everywhere imbued with power and meaning and symbolism, this view of the spatial is as an ever-shifting social geometry of power and signification” (1994:3). Spatial materialities may both reflect as well as constitute social dynamics, as “social change and spatial change are integral to each other” (ibid: 23). Material space thus forms an interesting point of analysis to reflect on social relations such as new, post-Fordist (work) socialities.
The increasing popularity of ‘coworking spaces’ illustrates the new spatial organization of work and shows how flexible, mobile workers spatially organize themselves within materialized socialities. Coworking spaces are workplaces shared by different individuals and businesses or organizations, with digital technologies facilitating this ‘working apart together’ (Richardson, 2017). Workers might have fixed desks or offices, but coworking spaces are also used by ‘hot-deskers’ who find a new space or desk to work every day (Brown & O’Hara, 2003; Richardson, 2017). People who work in a coworking space thus remain considerably mobile within a bound locality or space. Moreover, coworking spaces can provide workers with a network that can be useful to
them professionally: an important aspect that attracts people to such spaces is the sociability and presence of others (Brown & O’Hara, 2003; Liegl, 2014). This professional sociability often has a considerably informal character, as the appeal of coworking spaces lies “in their formal constitution as a bureaucratic structure beyond domestic space but that nonetheless retains informalities that challenge the boundaries of work and the rigidities of bureaucracy” (Richardson, 2017:7). Hence, although coworking spaces are initially intended as workplaces, they often cultivate an informality that suggests and stimulates the place to be used for activities not traditionally associated with work, reflecting and contributing to the blur between productive labour and private life.
In conclusion, the post-Fordist organization of work is characterized by a reliance on immateriality as both the product and productive activity of labour and an individualization of risk management. Both these processes have resulted in an increasing demand on workers to mobilize their private subjectivities and temporalities in their productive labor. At the same time, this new conception of labour strongly depends on the forming of new socialities such as professional networks, and new spaces of work are being established in which such socialities find a spatial materiality. This evokes the question how the material space of immaterial labour takes shape, which can be studied by looking at the way new socialities find their material translation in the spatial. Therefore, the analysis of the empirical section of this paper will be structured along two main lines: first, the question of how socialities of immaterial labour are cultivated within a space of new work will be addressed. The second section will then answer the question how these socialities are materialized in space.
Case and methods: ethnography of a coworking space
‘Welcome to Spring House, home for radical innovators!’
This study draws on an ethnographic case study of Spring House, a coworking space and ‘members club’ located in the city center of Amsterdam. Spring House is an excellent case of the increasing popularity of an industry of new workplaces that aims to bring people together to ‘co-work’ and connect (van der Meer, 2017). In other words, these spaces aim to facilitate the formation of (professional) socialities. Spring House is a workspace in the first place, but aims to be much more than that, exemplified by the many events that are organized for members and its strong focus on community building. On its website, Spring House is described as follows:
We share the desire for a more social and sustainable society. With room for 200 flexible and seated members, Spring House is our workspace, lab and platform. Here, at the Amsterdam waterfront, we inspire each other, work together, share alternative ideas with a larger audience, and develop these into actions.1
Moreover, on the ground floor of the Spring House building a renowned restaurant is located, which is open for the public and where members have coffee and lunch.
To be able to work in Spring House, membership is required. There are different memberships, ranging from fixed memberships that ‘give access to the entire club 24/7’
(and the choice between a flex desk, for a monthly fee of 350 euros, and a personal, fixed desk for a monthly fee of 450 euros) to social memberships that ‘give access to the living room member area between 3-8pm on weekdays’ (for a yearly fee of 350 euros). All members are invited to ‘members-only events and workshops’, will become part of ‘a network of innovators’ and can make use of the facilities such as meeting rooms (which are to be rented against extra payment), printers, personal lockers and ‘fresh fruit, tea and coffee’.2 However, Spring House is a semi-public workspace, as membership is not
accessible to all: applicants for a membership need to go through a selection process in which ‘a committee will select new members based on their creative and social ambitions’.3
Members of the self-proclaimed ‘Spring House community’ work in a broad range of professions that could be coined under the umbrella term of ‘immaterial labour’. For example, members work in the fields of ‘social design’, advertising, research and consultancy. Two organizations (both with around twenty employees) and one freelance individual form the basis of the community, as they together founded Spring House, have been working in Spring House for the longest time, and make up most of the ‘seated members’ with fixed desks. Most members who joined since the foundation of Spring House in 2015 are freelancers or employees of small organizations and use the space as mobile ‘hot-deskers’. By the time I was conducting my research, Spring House had around 160 members in total, some of who work in Spring House permanently and some of who are ‘social members’ who work or attend events in Spring House only occasionally.
Methods
The ethnographic data for this study was collected during three months in the spring of 2017. Throughout this period of fieldwork, I was particularly interested in the space of Spring House, its materiality, and the way the socialities within Spring House were reflected and constituted by the space. For this purpose, ethnographic research was a suitable research method. Willis and Trontman described the ethnographic method as “the disciplined and deliberate witness-cum-recording of human events”, in which “the understanding and representation of ‘experience’ is then quite central” (2000:5-6). As I was particularly interested in people’s movement in and experiences with the space, ethnography suited the study well. Most of the research was conducted through participant observation, but eleven semi-structured interviews with members and staff complement these observations, which were conducted in situ. Moreover, I draw on extensive documentation material such as photographs, blog entries and websites, and other documents such as the original business plan and the results of two surveys conducted among members by Spring House staff.
As I had previously worked for one of the two larger organizations located in Spring House, I was already familiar with the space, as well as with some of the members
2 Spring House memberships webpage. Retrieved from http://springhouse.nl/memberships/ 3 Spring House ‘sign up’ webpage. Retrieved from
https://members.springhouse.nl/membership_signup/new?plan_id=5a3f65703f316d87d3382ce 67d7c193e
and staff. The level of trust I had already developed with particularly the manager provided me with access easily. Hence, I entered the field as a ‘familiar face’, which made it easier to get in touch with people and understand the ‘Spring House culture’. Moreover, my own ‘habitus’ fitted the space and sociality well: from the start, I felt that I blended in rather naturally within Spring House. As a researcher, it is important to be aware of this feeling of ease in the environment. This semi-public space might not be so comfortable and easily accessible for people with different cultural dispositions.
Naturally, the study of one workplace such as Spring House draws on detailed descriptions of workplace evaluations and practices and does not provide representative data for a broader understanding of the spatial arrangement of new work. Therefore, this study functions as an explorative case study into the materiality of immaterial labour.
The sociality of immaterial labour
Public claims and professional instrumentality
In the original Spring House business plan, the space was envisioned to become ‘a clubhouse’ and ‘a place to connect with like-minded people’.4 Moreover, on its website
Spring House is described as housing a ‘community’ of members, a ‘family’ that co-works on ‘innovation’ in a space with ‘four floors of inspiration and collaboration’.5
These descriptions suggest that Spring House seeks to cultivate a sociality that is much more than one of ‘co-working’ individuals. One of its founders characterized the ‘community’ as follows:
“We are a clubhouse of innovators, which has always been our subtitle, so we have to be that. But everybody is innovative in his or her own field, so you get a very diverse group, very different but we all have a very similar drive: we are going to make the world a more beautiful and better place. So that is the selection. Well, and of course we just want fun people, you know. Every now and then you feel like, oh wait, there is someone who is only here to take something (die komt vooral halen). It should be about a certain reciprocity.”
The ambition to work on making ‘the world a more beautiful and better place’ is an expression of the more generally understood ‘common denominator’ of the Spring House ‘community’. This reflexive production was at the root of the concept, aspiring to bring so-called ‘radical innovators’ together in one building. In fact, this claim on a public cause is not only aspired but is required of the Spring House member, as it forms the main criterion for access to the ‘community’: those who wish to be a Spring House member must go through a selection process which selects members on the basis of ‘their creative and social ambitions’.6 Both members and staff speak of this exclusivity as
important in ensuring the ‘quality of the network’. However, what defines this quality? The following quotes show some of the results from a survey in which members were
4 Bright New House business plan, December 2014.
5 Spring House venue webpage. Retrieved from http://springhouse.nl/venue/ 6 Spring House ‘sign up’ webpage. Retrieved from
https://members.springhouse.nl/membership_signup/new?plan_id=5a3f65703f316d87d3382ce 67d7c193e
asked for their input on the membership selection criteria, again emphasizing the claim on a public ambition:
Anything goes, really. I think the common denominator should be genuine curiosity, social skills, high ambition and interest in and engagement with the state of society - not just to pay the bills.
Super smart, energetic ‘high flyers’ (hoogvliegers) that want to improve the world. Being an entrepreneur and making money comes second place.
(A proven track of) experience with innovative interventions and approaches, as well as the ambition and ability to learn from others and broaden one’s horizon. I think this criterion would enable the possibility to exclude certain parties that would like to leech off Spring House's image.
This emphasis on a public rather than a private ambition does not only apply to the product of work of the Spring House members, but is intended in the ‘publicness’ of the space of Spring House. In fact, an important reason for one of the organizations to establish Spring House was to become more ‘open to the public’: this organization was previously housed in a more traditional office building along the canals of Amsterdam, which one of their employees called “elitist” and “an ivory tower closed off from the world”. As an organization with a public mission, they were “basically obliged” to change location to a space that facilitates contact with strangers and shows an “openness towards the world”. Indeed, they are now in constant proximity to people who do not work in their organization and in that sense they are more public than before. However, that enhanced proximity is mostly to the other members, people who have gone through the selection process and pay a considerable fee to gain access to the space. Non-members can rent meeting spaces in Spring House and the restaurant on the ground floor is a public space that could potentially bring members in touch with ‘the world’ and vice versa. However, both the prices for eating in the restaurant and the costs for renting a space in Spring House do temper the accessibility for ‘the world’ to enter Spring House. Hence, an interesting contradiction exists here: on the one hand, the Spring House ‘community’ is explicitly exclusive and therefore semi-private. On the other hand, this exclusivity is based on the ambition and claim to work on a public mission, and the space of Spring House is aimed to be a public space that is open to ‘the world’. This space of public claims is thus considerably private and exclusionary.
Besides the claim on a public mission, another aspect deemed important in the ‘like-mindedness’ of the Spring House members is that of reciprocity. In fact, one of the quotes above explicitly advises to ‘exclude’ people that only come to ‘leech off the image’. Contributing to the ‘community’ is considered to be a vital aspect of membership, which for instance involves attending or initiating events regularly. A membership of Spring House requires the investment of time into the community-building aspects of the space, time that may have otherwise been spent on members’ private life.
Moreover, one’s personality also comes into play when being assessed for selection: being ‘a fun person’ is of importance, as the quote of one of the founders showed above. The subjectivity of these selection criteria comes back when one of the members of the selection committee talks about the process of selection:
“The club manager is the one who has conversations with new people, they come to her, write her an email, or she has a coffee date with them. So she sees how somebody comes across, the look they have in their eyes, those intuition things, and all we see is the text they fill in on the intake form. Anyway, what I notice when I read such a text is that I am quite critical: I think someone should make clear what he brings to Spring House, why it fits within this vague mission of making the world a better place. […] If I don’t read that in the text and it just says: you offer such nice coffee and the location is perfect, then I really think: unacceptable. But then there is the club manager, who says: I had a nice talk with that person and it doesn’t come across in the text, but I do think we should accept him or her because of this and this. And then we are usually like, ok, that’s fine.”
The club manager’s opinion is thus crucial in deciding upon an applicant’s access, and even though some semi-official selection criteria have been formulated (mainly relating to working on a public ambition), she might bring in other motivations (‘those intuition things’) for accepting a new member into the ‘community’. Although the selection committee emphasizes to strive for a ‘diversity’ of members, the process meant to select on the basis of applicants’ public ambitions might obscure how selection based on such subjective criteria can be subject to the (often) subconscious preference for people with similar cultural dispositions or ‘habitus’, excluding those without (Bourdieu, 1977).
Once selected into the community as one of the ‘like-minded radical innovators’, members can start to make use of the community as a professional network. Namely, ‘co-working’ in Spring House is not limited to working on individual projects in the same space, but in fact entails an ambition of ‘production’. Richardson defined co-production as “a process of making together that involves intermittent spaces of sharing and cooperation between different actors beyond and across firm organisational boundaries” (2016: 2256). Some members and staff expressed that ideally a ‘Spring House brand’ would develop that would generate ‘Spring House productions’. The Spring House identity that is supposedly defined by the public claim on ‘radical innovation’ is then turned into a brand that generates visibility of both individual members and Spring House as a collective. One of the founders of Spring House elaborated on this ambition, comparing Spring House to office buildings with a company name on the building:
“I had a fantasy that this would also become a big building with a name on it, but inside it would be organized differently, you know. We might need a sort of brand, or a label, to make sure that all those individual people who work for themselves can make a kind of mass, or to find a sort of organizational form to present to the outside world. […] So our fantasy is that eventually, when it is clear what happens here, that people will come to Spring House, like: I have a research question, I have a project, could you select a group of people from your members file…?”
Moreover, one of the members noted:
“We should start communicating to the outside as ‘label Spring House’. We need to search for ‘the business us-feeling’ (het zakelijke wij-gevoel): if we look for that, how we want to frame ourselves to the outside world, you find out what it is that we really are. […] We should define our identity to step outside as a unity. So we can make money from that. Otherwise it just becomes a kind of tea party (theekransje).”
Hence, the Spring House sociality or ‘community’ constitutes a network that can provide professional opportunities among individual members and organizations. Moreover, the Spring House identity based on a public claim is used to create a brand that generates visibility in ‘the outside world’ for both individual members and Spring House as a unity, generating work. This professional instrumentality however is not accessible to all: selection on the basis of one’s public ambition, willingness to invest time in contributing to the ‘community’ and one’s personality determine access to this professional visibility.
Private expressions
This professional sociality or network formed around a public claim interestingly finds its daily expression in a very private sociality within Spring House, revolving around the incitement of personal interactions, the mobilization of the intimate, and the building of trust between members and members and staff, as these two vignettes illustrate:
I am chatting with a new member, who tells me she became a member “for the network”. She is quick to emphasize that she is not just looking for a professional connection, but mostly for “the human aspect” (het menselijke): “People like you and me, who sit here, working all by themselves, we need that. A group we belong to, not being alone. I am not looking for a workplace. I am looking for a place where I feel at home, and where I know the people personally.”
While enjoying a cappuccino in the restaurant downstairs with one of the members, she tells me about the difference between Spring House members and members of another coworking space where she works: “There, you see those groups of freelancers that attend all networking drinks to distribute their business cards. They don’t understand how the new economy works. No, instead, you need to find common ground. That can also be something personal. A mutual love for tomatoes, for example. You need to build a basis of trust. For instance, I think I probably know around forty text editors. But there are only two I would actually use, because I know them, I trust them. They have a certain energy and presence that I find important. So that personal aspect is very important. I can teach the person what to do at work, but I cannot teach energy.”
Both members mention the personal, informal connection they are looking for within their work sociality. They search for affective bindings to other members, sharing an ‘energy’ or ‘mutual love’, which may eventually result in the development of professional relations. The vignettes are illustrative for the informal ‘network sociality’ that is cultivated within Spring House, in which “professional ties become increasingly playful”
(Wittel, 2001:68). This informality and playfulness is activated within Spring House in different ways.
First, every week many events are organized in Spring House, fulfilling different functions. Some fulfill a service function, such as the weekly visit of a hairdresser and a massage therapist, and the Wednesday in-house yoga classes. Others fulfill a more ritualistic function, such as the Spring House Christmas Dinner or the Family Easter Breakfast. Some members organize workshops to teach other members about their personal hobbies, like the ‘Sewing workshops with Eef’, or ‘Tango with Peter’. Moreover, every two weeks a ‘Lunch Talk’ takes place, during which one of the members shares a difficulty he or she is encountering professionally, while the other members eat their lunch. These talks are organized with the aim of creating a ‘safe space’ in which members can share insecurities about their work. The club manager expressed that the feeling of trust that is encouraged during these Lunch Talks is “a feeling of comfort that we want to create on a broader scale”. All these events are characterized by their goal of evoking a rather personal, intimate connection between members. Most of these in the first place revolve around the sharing of leisure activities and affective interactions, not around producing something together professionally. Moreover, they bring services normally sought outside the workplace and working hours (such as yoga classes) into the work sphere, thereby blurring the boundaries between work and private life.
One particularly intimate event that I attended was the ‘Spring House Academy by Night’, a yearly event that is organized with the aim of connecting members in a completely ‘out of the box’, non-work related way. In the following vignette, I describe the ‘opening ceremony’:
It’s 8 pm, and I am sitting on the floor on the third floor of the Spring House building with my eyes closed and my legs crossed, as ‘reverend Riko’ ceremoniously welcomes the ‘family’ into the night. He reads deep, Biblical texts, asking all members to be open for the night and all it has to bring. We may open our eyes now, and Riko tells us to look the person in front of us in the eyes for five minutes. Luckily, I know the woman in front of me, making it a slightly less awkward situation. Around me people are giggling. After 5 very long minutes, we all get a sheet of paper that lists fifteen ‘dark’ character traits, such as hateful, narcissistic, arrogant and sadistic. ‘Reverend Riko’ asks us to pick three of the traits that we have found in the other person, sharing with that person why.
This year, the event was themed ‘darkness’ and took place at night, from 8 pm to 9 am. Members were asked to bring pajamas, a sleeping bag and a flashlight, and the programme of the night was ‘top secret’. As the night progressed, different activities were organized, such as a ‘night dinner in the black square of Malevich’, a ‘blind trust’ activity where members guided each other through the building while blindfolded, and an ‘illegal rave’. All the while, different rooms in the building were made available for sleeping: the ‘attic’ was furnished with bunk beds, hammocks and tents were set up on the terraces, and one room was turned into a hut with pillows and sheets. The night ended with a ‘breakfast boat ride’ through the Amsterdam canals.
Clearly, nothing about this event reminds of the conventional sociality of work. The timing, asking members to spend a full night at ‘the office’ that would normally be
spent in a private setting, the ritualistic, secretive character of the programme and the intimate and affective connections aimed at remind more of a religious cult than of a community of co-workers. This event may be an extreme case, but does illustrate how spaces of new work like Spring House promote the blurring of the boundaries between work and private life. This evokes the question what happens if you do not wish, or are not able, to take part in such ‘community building’. According to Wittel, the incitement to develop such informal, playful social relationships characterizes network socialities, which does not mean that these relationships do not ultimately revolve around a professional instrumentality:
What unites all these networks, however, is their inherent ambivalence: on the one hand, they are instrumental and functional, on the other, they’re supposed to suggest the opposite. On the one hand the commodification of social relationships (doing a pitch, getting funds, finding work) is highly obvious, on the other, it is important to hide this commodification by creating a frame (music, alcohol, etc.) that makes people comfortable, that suggests a somehow ‘authentic’ interest in meeting people. (2001:56) This brings out the question whether not participating in the creation of this ‘frame’ of comfort or intimate lifestyle then leads to less attachment to the ‘community’ and therefore less professional opportunities. In other words, are these events ‘more than work’ or has sharing such intimacy become a vital aspect of work?
Another important element that the playful sociality within Spring House is built around is the activity of eating and drinking. Particularly the moments of lunch and coffee are important moments of the day in Spring House. Every day, the chef of the restaurant on the ground floor cooks a different meal for members, and they join the external guests in the public restaurant. However, members and external guests behave and are treated differently. Although the staff of the restaurant serves the members lunch, members bring their own plates back to the kitchen when they are finished, reminding of domestic chores. The staff chats very informally with members and knows most members’ names and dietary restrictions by heart. One of the founders of Spring House tells me that sharing the experience of having ‘good food’ together was something that was deliberately incorporated into the concept of Spring House:
“The good food fits with the idea of living and working together. Like such a lunch with each other, you know, the quality put into that: I think that people nowadays just have higher standards for their lives, and that they want the hard boundary between work and free time to become more diffuse. And we can facilitate that. Moreover, having good quality food together fulfills a social function.”
He mentions two reasons why sharing ‘good food’ in the workplace is important. First, he suggests that the standard of ‘good food’ that people may have in their private lives is increasingly incorporated in people’s standard at work, a blurring Spring House aims to facilitate. Moreover, these moments of having lunch or coffee together fulfill a social function: they are moments of sociality, moments of sharing something of good quality, which makes people connect on a personal, intimate level. This again contributes to the ‘frame of comfort’ or informal lifestyle that is created within Spring House. This
informality however does not mean a strict separation from work: members often discuss business during these moments. Incorporating ‘private standards of living’ into the work sphere thus contributes to the informal lifestyle that increasingly blurs the distinction between work and private life.
The Spring House staff plays an important role in cultivating this private sociality and informal lifestyle. The staff members maintain a very personal relationship with members and constantly walk around, water the plants and have a chat. The ‘club manager’ is considered to be the main spill in the network: during my time in Spring House, members and staff referred to her as a ‘business cupid’, ‘the mother of Spring House’, the ‘head of the household’ and even the ‘corn starch (maizena) of the space’. She keeps an eye on people’s behavior and reprimands them “when their behavior is really not ok”. Moreover, she encourages people to contribute to the community and attend events, and considers it her task to connect people, constantly thinking about which members might be useful to each other professionally (‘iets voor elkaar zouden kunnen betekenen’) or might get along well personally (‘het goed met elkaar zouden kunnen vinden’). One of the members tells me about a time the club manager encouraged him to get social:
“Some time ago I was reprimanded (op de vingers getikt) by her, well, reprimanded may be a big word but she addressed that I never talk to people here. She told me: in the end it’s all about the interaction with others here, you could get so much more out of that. So she gave me the name of someone who is in the publishing world like me, and told me: go have a chat with her. […] There is nothing concrete yet but I do think we can help each other out.”
The club manager knows every member and is (almost) always present in the building, therefore also noticing when a member is not participating and ‘getting everything out of it’. As the quote shows, when the manager feels like a member is not contributing to the sociality, she addresses this and puts slight pressure on that member to ‘reciprocate’ and make use of the network, either professionally or personally.
In an individualized labour market, having access to a network is often crucial for professional progress. Members do not merely come to Spring House for the physical place to work, but are looking for a ‘quality network’, that may eventually turn into a ‘brand’ that generates professional visibility. This network interestingly finds an expression in much more than a professional connection, as it is rooted in a sphere of intimacy and frame of comfort created through the organization of an informal lifestyle in Spring House. The participation in this lifestyle or private sociality then is instrumental in establishing professional opportunities and connections: “A fluid boundary between work-time and playtime is shaped by compulsory ‘‘schmoozing,’’ ‘‘face-time’’ or socializing within the industry after the workday” (Neff, Wissinger & Zukin, 2005: 321). This way, “the value of work as well as one’s own value as a worker are increasingly conceived in terms of identity and life-style” (Arvidsson, Malossi & Naro, 2010: 306) and this playful lifestyle obscures the intensification of work (Wittel, 2001). However, not everybody might be able to participate in and contribute to the sociality, as it requires one to sacrifice private time. Moreover, access to this lifestyle and sociality is exclusive,
first and foremost because people have to go through a selection process to gain access. Although this selection is officially based on people’s public ambitions and stimulates diversity, subjective judgments make such selection prone to personal preferences. The next section will address how this exclusive private sociality and informal lifestyle find a material translation in the spatiality of Spring House.
The materiality of immaterial labour
On one of the first mornings of my fieldwork, one of the receptionists gives me a tour through the building. Walking up the momentous wooden stairs that lead us from the restaurant and reception area on the ground floor to the first floor, she explains to me that this floor is called ‘The Living Room’. The area consists of different sitting areas, separated by high racks filled with plants, and two large ‘reading tables’, where some early birds have yet settled their ‘personal clutter’ of Macbooks, journals and cappuccino’s. The dimmed lights give this floor a calm, ‘homy’ feel, as does the colorful variety of couches and fauteuils that remind more of a cosy café than a workplace. She directs my attention to some of the artifacts spread all over the windowsills: a blue ceramic tea set, a record player, a collection of old Time magazines, a 3D printed lamp, a baseball glove, a box of Scrabble and some old books. When Spring House had just opened, she explains, new members were asked to bring an object from home, to give them a sense of ownership of Spring House and make them feel at home. In her words, it’s about “bringing in a piece of yourself (een stukje van jezelf meenemen).”
This vignette is telling, as it illustrates the clear connection between the aesthetic and the affective valuations aimed for in the spatial materiality of Spring House. A certain aesthetic is cultivated in order to provoke or stimulate a certain affect: the affect of comfort, of ‘feeling at home’. By giving this workspace the aesthetic of a living room, the desired immateriality (a comfortable lifestyle) is given a material translation.
This translation was in fact at the core of the conceptualization of the building itself, as the idea of a house was taken as the thematic and conceptual point of departure for the design of Spring House. On the website of the design company that was in charge of the interior design of Spring House, it is written that they:
Remodeled the floors to create a family of rooms that lend the complex a domestic feel. Just as a good house is made up of different spaces for different activities, Spring House consists of larger and smaller spaces that allow occupants to find the right setting for every occasion and type of work […] In that way, occupants can make the interior their own through a process of appropriation.
As shown in figures 1 and 2, the different floors of the building represent different ‘home-like’ spaces with corresponding different functions. The ground floor, on which the restaurant and reception are located, represents the ‘kitchen’ and is meant for meeting, eating and cooking. This space is open for the public. The first floor represents the ‘living room’, designed for members to have meetings and discuss. The second floor represents the ‘study’ and is considered a private area specifically meant for individual working. On this floor, many members with a fixed desk are located. The third floor has
the ‘attic’ and the ‘garden’ and is semi-public, as it is may be used for events and workshops for (external) groups but can also be used by members to work. Lastly, the small rooms on the fourth floor were originally named the ‘guest rooms’ and were designed as spaces where members could nap or even stay the night if needed. In reality, they are mostly used for meetings. The tallest point of the building, the glass ‘chimney-looking’ ceiling, is a special “symbolic domestic gesture on the roof”, as one of the founders told me. Hence, the architectural framework of a house was deliberately used in the design of the building, purposefully aimed at creating ‘a domestic feel’.
Figure 1 and 2: drawings by the designers of Spring House
Moreover, the designers’ statement quoted above refers to a ‘process of appropriation’: members and staff are encouraged to personalize the space, making the building ‘their own’. Personalization of a space may fuel people’s ‘home-making experiences’, as Ley-Cervantes and Duyvendak found that “the potentiality of a place to
foster feelings of home depends on the possibility of personalizing it, of achieving some sense of control over the space and imbue it with meaning” (2017:67). This personalization is stimulated in Spring House in different ways.
First, the possibility of being mobile within the building is experienced as contributing to members’ personal attachment to the space, as one of the members told me: “You can personalize it. It’s just great that I can choose where I work, according to how I feel: if I feel like it, I’ll go and sit upstairs in the sun. But when I need to work really hard, I’ll sit on the second floor to get into the work mode.” Members’ mood and daily activities thus influence their movement within the building, and this workspace makes such mobility possible, just like a home may. Another way in which members’ personalization or ‘process of appropriation’ of the material space is stimulated is through the tradition of bringing in objects from home, mentioned in the introducing vignette of this section. One of the members, who had been a member since day one, explained to me how this tradition came about:
“From the start, the most important thing was: the building should not be overdesigned, it should be filled in by the residents. That’s why new members got the assignment: bring an object from home. I, for example, brought a tea set, which I still use all the time. People come up to me sometimes and say: what a nice tea set! It’s really something that is part of your own ritual in the house.”
Hence, ‘residents’ (members often use this word, translated from the Dutch bewoners) are encouraged to physically contribute to the space, attaching themselves to its materiality by creating ritualistic habits connected to the materiality of the space. This personalization then is meant to invoke a ‘feeling at home’. However, the personalization of the space does have limits, as most members do not have their own, personal desk: they can leave their personal items in a locker, but cannot leave these items around the building and really create their ‘own’ workplace. Only against a high price can members rent their own, personal desk that they can set up in their own preferred way. Moreover, although the building is semi-private and only members can access most spaces, the building remains rather transparent: the ‘open floor plan’ of most spaces makes it difficult to withdraw from visibility and create real privacy. Members are invited to personalize the space to evoke a private, home-like atmosphere, but this personalization remains considerably public and transparent and the real privacy of the home cannot be found in the space, creating an interesting ambivalence.
More ‘things’ or artifacts contribute to the ‘materiality of home’ in Spring House. One of such ‘things’ evoking a ‘feeling at home’ that came back time and again during my fieldwork in Spring House were the plants. Throughout the building, plants of many different shapes and sizes perk up the rooms. In the tour through the building, the receptionist points to the plants on the terrace outside, saying:
“The plants are really part of the house. Outside on the terrace we have plants that are actually cared for by members. It’s really important to us, that we grow our own plants. That is why we also have a members’ ‘gardening club’ (‘kluitclub’), for our garden of the house. Just like we have other clubs, like the art club and the book club. […] Those are
all very domestic things: the idea behind it is that that also improves the work atmosphere. You connect people by making them work in the garden together. I think that the alternation between professional, work, and personal, doing fun things together, is very important in feeling comfortable in a space.”
Here, the materiality of the plants and the corresponding actions attached to this materiality are argued to create a feeling of comfort. As the activity of gardening is connected to the plants, an activity not directly related to members’ work, this materiality evokes a private sociality (‘gardening together’) that is in turn argued to improve the ‘work atmosphere’. Hence, the materiality of the space facilitates the development of such informal social relations. Along the lines of Massey’s notion of the interdependence between the social and the spatial (1995), the spatial materiality thus reflects and constitutes the social relations in Spring House.
The connection between spatial materiality and the feeling of comfort in the workplace comes back in the following vignette, in which a member compares the aesthetic of Spring House to the ‘conventional office aesthetic’:
“If this would not be a beautiful place I would absolutely not work here. You just want a comfortable workplace.” She points to one of the large office buildings across the railroad, that we can see from the window: “Sometimes when I see those people in a huge office building I think to myself: they look like ants. Why? Really: why? I don’t understand why you would ever want to work in a place like that.”
Apparently, this member looks for comfort in the workplace and finds this in Spring House because it is aesthetically pleasing to her. Not only do the activities attached to a materiality (as gardening is to plants) evoke a feeling of comfort, so do the aesthetic attributes of the materiality itself.
Another member explained to me what the feeling of comfort or ‘feeling at home’ in Spring House brings her: “The notion home for me is just about wellbeing, about feeling comfortable somewhere. And when I feel pleasant somewhere, that’s also good for my creativity.” Comfortable places characterized by their informal, playful sociality and materiality, are thus said to inspire and induce creativity, as “play is associated with creativity, experimentation and innovation; it stands counterposed to bureaucracy and a Protestant work ethic” (Wittel, 2001: 69). The desire of working in a space with a ‘beautiful’ aesthetic, in which (previously considered) private materialities and corresponding activities are incorporated, then symbolizes a more general wish for a passionate attachment to work, the notion that work should be enjoyed and lead to self-actualization (McRobbie, 2015). This ‘passionate labour’ is counterposed to routine work in anonymous office buildings, which comes back in the way the member in the vignette above contrasts Spring House to the monotonous anonymity of the office collective, comparing it to ants in their colonies. However, this discourse of ‘doing what you love’ (Tokumitsu, 2015) in a place that you love has a few important pitfalls. First of all, the cultural and aesthetic characteristics of ‘passionate labour’ may present uncertainty as desirable, obscuring the intensification of work. The frame of comfort, authenticity and creativity that is developed in spaces like Spring House then occults the work that is
being done and rather leads to believe that we are not actually performing productive labour: “discussions about “creativity” would quickly turn away from work to focus instead on the creative lifestyle” (Arviddson et al., 2010: 305). Second, the implied agentic power that workers have in determining what work they do and where they do it (as is so clearly articulated in the member’s insensitivity towards the possibility that some people might not have the choice to work in a beautifully designed space like Spring House), is not available to all. Having this power actually reflects a certain privilege. Moreover, spaces like Spring House are so comfortable to some because of the exclusive access to their personalization. There is thus an inherent contradiction in the notion that everybody should be able to work in a ‘comfortable’ space like Spring House, when their exclusivity creates their comfort.
This exclusive access to the space becomes clear when addressing the people who work in Spring House but who are not considered members. For example, the cleaning staff plays an important role in maintaining the aesthetic of the space, as without them the building would not be clean. Before I had set an appointment with one of them to conduct an interview, I had never seen them in the building as they work every day in the early morning hours and usually leave before the first member has arrived. In light of the strong stimulation of members’ visibility and presence, their invisibility is striking. Not considered members of the Spring House community, they are, for example, not invited to most Spring House events. This is not to say that they would want to attend: the cleaning lady told me she would not be interested in spending an evening in Spring House. However, the fact that they are so clearly not considered part of the ‘family’ shows a social division between groups within Spring House. One anecdote that a member told me makes this division particularly clear, showing how these different groups get different access to the personalization of the space and how exclusion finds its expression in the materiality of Spring House. During Christmas time, one of the cleaners of the building had left behind a Christmas decoration (kerststukje) when she had finished work, to wish the Spring House community a merry Christmas. However, the aesthetic of this piece was not much appreciated by the Spring House staff and a fuss was created around the question where it should be placed in the building. In the same period, members were asked to participate in a ‘Christmas origami workshop’ with one of the artist members, to create do-it-yourself Christmas decorations to decorate Spring House. Hence, although members were stimulated to contribute to the aesthetic and thus personalize the space, other ‘non-members’ were not. On which basis are such boundaries of personalization enacted? They might be aesthetic boundaries, with the cleaning lady not being aware or understanding the ‘cultural codes’ of the space, but they might also be about who may contribute and who may not: the cleaning staff is not considered member and may therefore not contribute. The ‘personalization’ of the materiality is thus limited to a few carefully selected contributors, which in turn reinforces the specific aesthetic that is in place and renders the aesthetics of non-members as such invisible.
Hence, the spatial materiality of Spring House reflects and constitutes the exclusive private sociality and informal lifestyle that is encouraged within the space. The materiality of the ‘house’, made up by the design of the building and its ‘things’ or artifacts, and the process of personalization and activities attached to these materialities,
are carefully constructed to evoke an affect of comfort and ‘feeling at home’. This reflects the increasing blur between the private and the professional sphere, with ‘the home’ no longer standing in stark contrast to ‘the office’: “from a design perspective, we could say urban and transitional landscapes are turned into living rooms and offices or rather living-room-office-hybrids” (Liegl, 2014:166). Moreover, the exclusive access to the personalization of the space reflects the exclusivity of Spring House as a whole.
Conclusion
Drawing on an ethnographic case study of Spring House, a coworking space in Amsterdam, this article has addressed the question how socialities of immaterial labour find their material translation in space. In the post-Fordist organization of work, both the product as well as the productive activities of labour are formed around the production of immaterialities (Lazzarato, 1997). In this new system of value production, workers are required to mobilize their very personal subjectivities. Moreover, the flexibilization or ‘precarization’ of the labour market has resulted in an increasing individualization of risk, which requires workers to market their very self and invest (previously) private time in work. The forming of new socialities or ‘networks’ then is of crucial importance in establishing a position in this ‘brave new world of work’ (Beck, 2000). Such socialities may exist virtually, but may also be materialized in space. Understanding that “the spatial is social relations stretched out” (Massey, 1995), studying space in relation to socialities can thus teach us more about the way such socialities are constituted. Therefore, taking the case of Spring House, I specifically tried to answer two questions. First, how are socialities of immaterial labour cultivated within the space of Spring House? Second, how does the spatial materiality of Spring House reflect and constitute such new kinds of post-Fordist work socialities?
This case study has illustrated that immaterial labour is not without a materiality, something Lorey already recognized: “It is a materiality not only of performative bodies, but also of subjectivations and socialities” (2015: 84). The materiality of the space of Spring House reflects and constitutes the sociality that it cultivates, which is marked by an intense privatization. Although Spring House is essentially a workplace that aims to generate professional connections, both the sociality and the materiality cultivated in Spring House revolve around the creation of a ‘frame’ of comfort and an informal lifestyle. Members and staff participate in all kinds of intimate ‘family’ activities and through personalization of the space (to a certain transparent degree), the materiality of the space aims to remind of a ‘home’. This workspace is thus characterized by a privatization that blurs the distinction between work and private life. The frame of comfort that is created through this privatization may obscure the essentially professional instrumentality of membership and may present the mobilization of the private in work as desirable, thereby occulting the fact that work is crossing all kinds of (previously) private boundaries leading to an intensification of work (Wittel, 2001). Moreover, this privatization stands in stark contrast with the claim on publicness that characterizes the Spring House ‘identity’ or ‘brand’. Access to this space is not available to all, as a careful selection process assures exclusive access for ‘like-minded people’. This exclusion finds it
material translation in the exclusive access to the personalization of the space and the invisibility of non-members working in Spring House, such as the cleaning personnel.
The socialities that develop under immaterial labour then are individualized, exclusive socialities that may be formed on the basis of lifestyle and intimacy. Sharon Zukin recognized how the formation of urban communities on the basis of lifestyle may result in exclusion: “They are united by their consumption of authenticity. And, over time, this norm of alternative consumption becomes a means of excluding others from their space.” (Zukin, 2008: 745). Moreover, she argued that such identification with lifestyle might result in political disengagement and segregation from different urban groups (Zukin, 1998). These lifestyles may form on the basis of public claims but can thus essentially represent a “publicness without a public sphere” where “social practices that are oriented not solely to the self and one’s own milieu, but rather to living together and to common political action, recede ever more into the background and become ever less imaginable as a lived reality” (Lorey, 2015: 90). Further research should explore further how such new (work) socialities form, especially how the informality of its formation may result in exclusion. Moreover, it would be important to understand how the exclusion from these socialities may impact one’s position in the labour market and play into inequality. Along the lines of Massey’s conception of the spatial, this article has shown how social relations and space mutually constitute each other and therefore emphasizes the importance of incorporating the study of the material spatiality of new work.
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