Abstract

This thesis investigates how coworking spaces are reshaping labour practices, social networks, and work mobility in the Greater Montreal region amid contemporary economic transformations. Drawing on Foucaultian perspectives of neoliberalism and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), it conceptualizes coworking spaces as socio-material infrastructures that both respond to and reproduce the tensions of flexible work, negotiating between autonomy and precarity, sociality and isolation, and flexibility and the need for stability. This research combines quantitative mapping of coworking spaces in Montreal, analyzing their geographical distribution and pricing structures, with qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with coworkers and managers of these spaces. The analysis reveals that coworking spaces function as hybrid infrastructures of care and control. They mitigate some drawbacks of remote work, yet they also exacerbate self-responsibilization by shifting costs, risks, and self-management onto workers. Through ANT, the thesis traces how spatial design, technologies, routines, and commuting practices assemble networks that enact productivity, sociability, and accountability in everyday life. In sum, this thesis reveals how the logics of flexibilization and entrepreneurial subjectivity take material form, and are challenged, within these spaces. As such, coworking spaces operate as experimental infrastructures for the future of work: prototypes that make visible the negotiations through which workers, workplaces, and cities redefine the shifting boundaries of labour and life.