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This study aims at presenting an analysis of a Change Laboratory conducted with the personnel of a youth supported housing unit for clients with a history or at risk of homelessness. The analysis is centered on how the workers’ expansive learning process was supported ensuring that they would be in the lead of their workplace transformation process.

The data were collected in six Change Laboratory sessions facilitated by interventionist-researchers and were analyzed with a specific method of discourse analysis devised for tracing expansive learning at work, the method of analysis of expansive learning actions and deviation from instructional intentions. The purpose of this method of analysis is to present in a detailed and structured manner how workplace expansive learning unfolds.

The results of the analysis indicate that the contribution of the practitioners participating in this Change Laboratory was such that the undertaken transformation resulting from the expansive learning process was actually owned by them. These results contribute to ongoing discussions on workplace expansive learning, which question the extent to which the Change Laboratory is truly a participatory intervention method in which the participating practitioners’ agency becomes visible without the interventionists necessarily dominating.

This study addresses existing gaps in the literature on workplace expansive learning, by opening up a novel perspective for detailed empirical enquiries that demonstrate the role workers may play in supported expansive learning processes and ensuing transformations of their workplaces.

Building on the existing literature and on a series of interviews conducted in very diverse coworking spaces, this article attempts at analyzing coworking by focusing on the historical evolution and heterogeneity of its interpretations, as well as the plurality of its realization in practice and prospective developments.

The theoretical framework adopted is Cultural Historical Activity Theory – a dialectical approach which allows the study of human activities as historically evolving and complex systems which change under the impulse of their inner contradictions. The analysis presented here starts with an overview of the history of the theoretical elaborations and discussions of coworking. The authors then focus on the experiences and interpretations of this phenomenon as conveyed by coworkers and coworking managers in the north of Italy – one of the most active coworking areas in Europe.

Coworking first emerged as a way of promoting forms of work and organization that require simultaneous, multidirectional, and reciprocal work, as understood in contrast to forms that incorporate an established division of labor, demarcated communities, and formal and informal sets of rules. However, with time, coworking has evolved toward novel directions, giving rise to heterogeneous interpretations of it. Inquiry constitutes a deeper investigation of the heterogeneity of coworking. The take-away message here is that the prefix co- in coworking can be interpreted, through a play of words, to evoke multiple positions and views conveying internal contradictions.

The historical overview of coworking shows a strong differentiation and multisided interpretation of this phenomenon along two dimensions of historical development, namely, social and business, and outward and inward. The qualitative analysis of the interviews traces the different lived interpretations and conceptions of coworking. The analysis confirms, on the one hand, the complexity and heterogeneity described in the literature, and on the other hand, it enriches the literature by depicting the contradictory nature of the phenomenon, including how the historical and inner tensions of coworking are dynamically evolving in the concrete experiences reported by the managers and users in the coworking spaces.