I’ve been using the term “cowork” in a much more general sense than the idea of a shared space to work with other people. I’m using it to be the union of a wide variety of ways that people can work together, and more specifically, the combination of cooperative and collaborative forms of working that make up the majority of work regimes in modern business.

Many folks use the term collaboration in this way, but I make a clear distinction between cooperative and collaborative forms of cowork:

Collaboration is a form of coworking where those participating share long-term goals, a common strategy about how the work will be performed, and subordinate their personal aims to the company or organization that will own the outcomes of the work. As a result, the participants form a collective in which people assume roles defined by the structure of the work, often defined as a business process, and accept detailed management of how they are to accomplish the tasks they are asked to perform.

Cooperation is a form of cowork where participants share short-term goals — generally defined by the duration of a project or the timeframe of each individual’s tasks — and a common set of principles regarding how cooperative work is managed. The individuals place their own advancement and interests ahead of the project, and agree only to perform their work to the best of their professional skills. The participants form a connective, operating as a network of  independent and autonomous agents, deciding how to accomplish the tasks they are asked to take on according to their own judgment.

My belief is that we are seeing a transition from collaborative work to more cooperative forms, especially as work becomes increasingly more non-routine, and as companies seek to gain resilience and speed through the use of freelancers. So this post is an effort to clarify the use of the term coworking, as an umbrella for all forms of people working together. And the reality is that in any setting, any company or organization, there is a spectrum of cowork, with some people working as a collective in the development team, but much more cooperatively in marketing, and so on. But the trend is increasingly toward cooperation, because it leads to a looser — and hence faster — organization.