Indeed, all these older examples highlight that the exact historical date of the origin of a new social trend is not always easy to specify. In any case, the coworking movement seemed to really take off in the 2000s, and then increased in intensity. Thus, we may consider the first decade of the twenty-first century as its real starting point.In parallel, other variants of collective workspaces were taking off, such as hackerspaces, makerspaces, and fablabs. Some authors consider that the collaborative dimension is more evident in hackerspaces than in coworking spaces. Lallement (2015) carried out a pioneering ethnographic study on hackerspaces and Fab Labs (Fabrication Laboratory) in Northern California, in particular on the hackerspace "Noisebridge" (which cultivates an anarchistic and libertarian culture), and showed the importance of mutual collaboration and community for these spaces. Independently of their differences, most of the members of those spaces privileged the creation of social links while sharing their knowledge and experience with others. In our view, some coworking and some hackerspaces are more collaborative, while others take a more individualistic perspective.
COWORKING AS AN INSTITUTION IN A LONGER HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVECoworking has become a social fact that gathers different characteristics of an institution, in the sociological sense of the term: it represents an established practice that benefits from great legitimacy today; it has a history, offers a guiding model, is external to the single individual, is binding, and plays an important role for the formation (and reproduction) of social groups. Like most institutions, the terms "coworking" and "coworker" have evolved throughout history, with their first documented uses dating back to the early seventeenth century. The