Working apart, together: offline co-presence and the re-embedding of community support in platform freelancing

Purpose This paper examines how platform freelancers construct meaningful work in settings where the online community support presupposed by current theorising on gig-economy meaningfulness is thin, fragmented, or absent. Drawing on the case of Albanian freelancers active on Upwork, the study asks where social belonging is reconstructed when neither stable organisational structures nor robust online peer communities are available and how this reconstruction shapes the conditions under which platform work can be experienced as meaningful. Design/methodology/approach The study employs a multi-level qualitative case study that combines secondary analysis of macro-level institutional conditions and meso-level platform governance with twenty semi-structured interviews with Upwork freelancers in Albania, sampled via the Gigmetar Albania database. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis informed by Psychology of Working Theory and the integrative gig-economy framework of Lysova and Zeng (2025). Findings Freelancers reconstruct community support not predominantly through online peer networks – the mechanism foregrounded by current theory – but through offline co-presence in cafés and informal co-working routines. This place-based community partially substitutes for the absent organisational architecture of platform work, supporting relatedness, boundary work and a sense of normal working life. Where this offline embedding is unavailable or insufficient, individual strategies follow a directional sequence from meaning construction toward identity distancing, instrumentalisation and exit-oriented thinking, with autonomy itself becoming inverted through always-on availability. Originality/value The paper's primary contribution is to extend the third domain of the Lysova and Zeng (2025) framework. In under-institutionalised settings, community support in platform freelancing is locally re-embedded rather than online-dominant, suggesting that the online/offline composition of community support is empirically variable and context-conditioned rather than theoretically settled. The Albanian setting is theoretically revealing rather than a formally critical case; its value lies in surfacing presuppositions about online community that more institutionally dense settings allow to remain implicit.