What is it about?
Starting a new business is tough and one of the biggest challenges is being taken seriously. Entrepreneurs need to convince investors, customers, and peers that their venture is credible and worth supporting. But they also need to stand out from the crowd. How do you fit in and stand out at the same time? This study explores how entrepreneurs in coworking spaces navigate this tension. Coworking spaces bring together startups, freelancers, investors, and corporate partners under one roof. Unlike traditional offices, these spaces are open, fluid, and filled with people who have very different expectations about what makes a venture legitimate. Drawing on interviews and observations from different coworking spaces, we found that entrepreneurs don't build credibility alone. Instead, they do it together through a process we call co-legitimation. This happens in two main ways. First, through everyday relationships: sharing advice, making introductions, building trust over time, and learning from people with different skills. Second, through symbolic actions: presenting at events, using the professional workspace to impress external audiences, and carefully managing what information they share with different people. These practices help entrepreneurs gain recognition within their community while maintaining their unique identity and independence. The coworking space itself plays an active role — its events, shared facilities, and diverse membership create the conditions that make co-legitimation possible. Our findings suggest that coworking spaces are more than just places to work. They are legitimacy infrastructures — environments where entrepreneurs and their communities jointly build credibility, meaning, and resilience over time. This matters for entrepreneurs choosing where to base their ventures, for coworking space managers designing their services, and for policymakers supporting startup ecosystems.
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Why is it important?
Coworking spaces are more than shared offices, they are where entrepreneurs collectively build the credibility needed to survive and grow. Understanding this matters for founders, space managers, and policymakers supporting startup ecosystems.
Perspectives
Most research assumes entrepreneurs build credibility on their own — through their pitch, their network, their personal effort. But that's not how it works in practice. This study shows that in coworking spaces, entrepreneurs build credibility together. They help each other gain trust, share knowledge, make introductions, and present a professional image to investors and clients. We call this process co-legitimation. Drawing on interviews and observations from coworking spaces, we reveal that coworking spaces are not just shared offices, they are environments where credibility is collectively built, allowing entrepreneurs to fit in with their community while still standing out as distinctive ventures.
Mahmood Aslam
Northumbria University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Distinctiveness through community: co-legitimation processes in coworking spaces, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, April 2026, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/ijebr-03-2025-0308.
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