Coworking and solidarity among peers : a full network study of the emergence of support between co-working freelancers

While the social sciences have acquired considerable knowledge of how solidarity is enhanced by institutional and organizational configurations, less is known about endogenous mechanisms eliciting solidary behaviour within networks of economic exchange. To fill this gap, we analyzed the formation of support ties within a multiplex network of independent workers who spontaneously collaborate as peers without any formal organizational structure. Drawing on the literature on reciprocity and solidarity within Social Exchange Theory, we tested: (i) Trust in business as a mechanism underlying the relationship between collaboration and non work-related support; (ii) the endogenous effects of direct and indirect reciprocity on the emergence of a support network. We collected network and demographic data through a questionnaire, which has been administered to all the 29 freelancers who share a coworking space in Brescia, Italy. This group has been selected because the coworking space did not have any formal organizational structure providing incentives for collaboration between its members. This was an ideal context for disentangling the spontaneous formation of support ties from business interactions. The data collection followed a 3-month ethnographic pre-study, which helped understand the context, obtain full participation to the survey, and calibrate the questionnaire. Network data have been collected by means of the name-generator approach. Support was measured by asking each subject whom they would turn to in case of need of material and emotional help for non work-related issues. A collaboration matrix resulted from the integration of data on incoming and outgoing flows of transactions, weighted by the respective satisfaction level. In order to test the role of business-related trust, subjects have been asked to cite trustworthy people as potential business partners. Finally, data about covariate networks have been collected as control factors: advice-seeking within the previous 12 months, friendship, and previous acquaintance. We also gathered data about sociodemographic and business-related characteristics of the actors (age, gender, education, seniority, business revenues) and measured their baseline levels of generalized trust and group identification. We simulated the emergence of the networks of support and trust by applying a family of multivariate exponential random graph models, controlling for actor-relation effects and exogenous effects yielded by covariate networks. Our hypotheses have been tested by obtaining maximum likelihood estimates of the effect of various local network configurations on the observed networks. We found that expectations of support were not significantly reciprocated in a direct way, nor did they form cycles of generalized exchange. Conversely, support ties appeared to coalesce into local clusters by following transitive paths. Thus, the results suggest the emergence of informal local hierarchies, which drive the formation of expectations of support. Finally, we observed that trusting another freelancer for business purposes significantly fosters expectations of support even for non work-related issues. In conclusion, our work suggests that trust in business is likely to work as a mechanism for the formation of solidarity among coworking peers with no formal organizational structure. Moreover, our study provides an interesting insight on the way informal hierarchical structures may emerge among peers.