ABSTRACT
If the corporation was the family of welfare capitalism, coworking is the community of precarity, or what might be better termed entrepreneurial austerity. This chapter draws on ethnographic fieldwork at coworking sites in several US and international cities to focus on the role of the community manager. Observations and interviews show how community managers shape the atmosphere of coworking spaces, creating connections between previously individual workers such as freelancers, entrepreneurs, consultants, and remote employees. In this way, coworking spaces host an environment in which today’s professionals can anticipate, withstand, or even wait out the volatility of the competitive job market that surrounds them. The findings suggest that the community manager is a reimagining of the traditional secretary – an iconic emotional laborer – albeit with even more jobs and “side-hustles” to maintain simultaneously. Community managers are the trustees for sites that allow new affective arrangements to be established, new feeling rules modeled, and new labor relations pre- and re-figured.
