Broker roles of collaborative working spaces between socially-oriented creative entrepreneurship and their ecosystems

Abstract

Social enterprises within creative industries are on the rise in rural regions, which aim to address the local community needs and tackle challenges in maintaining local vibrancy and vitality. This trend is driven by a desire to take local social responsibility through a creative approach in rural communities. Collaborative working spaces (CWS) are increasingly important in facilitating these activities, especially those multi-functional CWSs in rural areas, which often combine creative hub, economic support, and incubator aspects. They act as a broker who links, holds, reorganises and reproduces the entrepreneurial resources in a shared space of CWS. This paper presents an empirical study of social enterprises which get support on both their social missions and business running from a CWS in rural Upper Austria, drawing on interviews with CWS managers and observations to understand how the CWS connects local and external resources from the entrepreneurial ecosystem to the entrepreneurs. An assemblage perspective is applied to frame the functioning resources involved as a territorialisation process. The brokers’ functions of the CWS are realised through internal exchange events, daily communication, and outside linkages, which are supported by the CWS’s organisational structure, the key person inside, and the spatiality of the CWS. By examining the biographies of the enterprises along with their resource demand and catchment process, this paper reveals the evolution of the enterprise-support functions of the CWS. The findings suggest strategies for promoting CWS in the social creative industries and highlight the key role that CWS can play in supporting social entrepreneurship with creative industries in rural areas. This study contributes to the broader understanding of how CWSs can be strengthened in non-urban contexts, and underscores the importance of supporting entrepreneurship in rural communities.