Building Community in the Remote Workplace
In this article, Will Bennis reflects on his efforts to build community among freelancers and remote workers. What he couldn’t anticipate, however, were the challenges he would face in doing so — challenges that he and Marko Orel expand upon in “Taboo Trade-Offs in the Community Business: The Case of Coworking” in the Journal of Management Inquiry.
In 2010, I founded a coworking space for freelancers and other solo-remote workers who missed the sense of community that often comes with work from a company office. Coming from a background in cultural psychology, I already believed that in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) cultures (Henrich et al., 2010), community was becoming an increasingly scarce resource. With that in mind, I thought that community-centered coworking spaces would fill an important and growing niche. Despite an overwhelmingly positive experience, however, I faced recurring challenges that seemed directly related to an incompatibility between the concept of community and the prospect of selling or buying it.
What I had failed to consider, but that in retrospect seems clear, is that community—like love or happiness—is not the kind of good that can readily be bought or sold. The psychological anthropologist Alan Fiske’s Relational Models Theory provides a valuable perspective for understanding this observation (1992). He points to four cross-culturally universal, non-fungible forms of social relationships, two of which are most relevant here, communal sharing and market pricing. Communal sharing is associated with families and other tight groups that see themselves and other members as part of a greater whole with its own distinct intrinsic value. Giving and taking is about perceived capacity (to give) and need (to take) and the concept of exchange is largely absent. Market pricing, however, is associated with more impersonal relationships.
The idea of exchange is central, and values can be converted to a common, precise currency. Communal sharing dates back to the earliest human social relationships, whereas market pricing is a relatively new human invention. Fiske, with his psychologist colleague Philip Tetlock, theorized and provided compelling experimental evidence that mixing relational models promotes a sense of cognitive, affective, and behavioral aversion that they refer to as taboo trade-offs, with trade-offs between communal sharing and market pricing being the most taboo (Fiske & Tetlock, 1997). To the extent coworking spaces and other community businesses seek to provide a sense of community captured by communal sharing, but to sell it for a fee as captured by market pricing, they provide a solid real-world example of taboo trade-offs.
I was discussing the topic with my colleague Marko Orel, a workplace sociologist and co-founder of his own coworking space, and we agreed that that Relational Models Theory and taboo trade-offs provide a valuable framework for understanding this challenge. Expecting our experiences would represent a more widespread challenge among businesses that seek to facilitate community, we decided to write a paper about it: “Taboo Trade-Offs in the Community Business: The Case of Coworking” (Bennis & Orel, 2023). We’d love to hear back about its resonance with other managers seeking to build a sense of community for their paying customers, and about what strategies have worked for them.
