Decades of research have shown the salience of legitimacy for organizations, with history emerging as a critical resource for legitimacy claims. Organizations can leverage their past to bolster their image, refashion their identity or shape the course of their future. Yet, not every organization or sector possesses, or is embedded in, a long history that can be mobilised towards a specific end. We know little about how such organisations mobilise history and the past in the pursuit of future-oriented (forms of) legitimacy. Here, we ask: How do organizations operating in a sector without an extended history position themselves vis-à-vis the past when articulating and legitimizing their future? We examine this question in the context of the coworking movement. Drawing from interviews with senior managing staff in coworking spaces located in four global cities, we explore how the past and history are mobilised in the articulation of future-oriented legitimising strategies for coworking spaces. We show that this process relies on five temporal narratives – Historicizing, Detaching, Bracketing, Anchoring and Projecting – each connected to their own legitimacy claims. These narratives translate into two complementary historical and legitimizing frames that are weaved together to articulate a legitimate vision of the future of coworking spaces.
