Despite its promises of democratization and transformative innovation, the Space Economy (SE) offers a powerful context for advancing research in Critical Management Studies (CMS). It is an arena where questions of power, institutional logics, and market rationalities are becoming increasingly visible as private actors, governments, and dominant firms shape the future of space activity.
For CMS scholars, the SE is especially compelling because it foregrounds tensions between technological imagination and political possibility. Space has become a site where commercialization, privatization, and capital accumulation raise urgent questions about who benefits, who bears the risks, and whose interests define the future of this emerging domain. Issues such as the privatization of the global commons, extractive frontier logics, and the social and environmental consequences of space activity make the SE a rich empirical setting for critical inquiry.
The SE also exemplifies core CMS themes including control and resistance in emerging industries, alternative organizational forms, and the commercialization of research under neoliberalism. It creates an opportunity to examine whether frontier industries can genuinely support more inclusive, democratic, and transformative alternatives or whether they reproduce dominant managerialist and technocratic forms under new labels.
Our PDW, Space Economy: Consolidating a Research Agenda, invites CMS scholars to engage with the SE as a live laboratory for studying contested organizational futures. It offers a forum to explore how management scholarship can move beyond critique alone and engage performatively with questions of alternative organizing, resistance, ownership, governance, and social transformation in the space sector.
📍 PDW at AOM 2026: Space Economy: Consolidating a Research Agenda
🗓 August 1, 2026 | 2:00–5:30 PM
📌 Loews Hotel, Philadelphia, USA
🔗 Register (open until sold out): https://lnkd.in/e3czZT4R
📩 Questions: Mehdi.montakhabi@said.oxford.edu
------------------------------
Mehdi Montakhabi
Associate Scholar
University of Oxford | Saïd Business School
------------------------------