The Space Economy (SE) offers a highly consequential context for advancing research in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). It combines frontier, expert-intensive work and powerful mission narratives with project-based organizing, security and regulatory constraints, and concentrated control over infrastructure and standards.
For DEI scholars, this makes the SE a fertile setting for examining how inequality is produced and legitimized in real time through hiring and credentialing, access to stretch assignments, sponsorship, performance evaluation, and whose expertise and risk concerns are treated as credible. Classic DEI questions around inclusion, voice, and psychological safety are especially sharp in the SE because work often unfolds under tight coupling and high consequence, where speaking up, dissent, and error reporting are essential, but also socially risky.
The SE also foregrounds how inequality is structured across interorganizational ecosystems. Space activity depends on layered supply chains and public–private partnerships, where core actors (such as agencies, primes, and dominant platform firms) set technical interfaces, procurement rules, and compliance regimes that shape opportunities for peripheral firms, contractors, and workers. This creates valuable opportunities to study how power, dependency, and inclusion commitments travel across organizational boundaries, including through contracting, subcontracting, and global production networks.
Finally, the SE's distinctly transnational character makes questions of global equity and epistemic authority unavoidable. Participation in governance, access to orbital resources, and influence over standards and rule-setting remain unevenly distributed across states and corporations. A DEI lens can help interrogate who is recognized as a legitimate stakeholder, whose knowledge counts in decisions about safety, sustainability, and access, and how inclusion is negotiated while the field itself is still taking shape.
Our PDW, Space Economy: Consolidating a Research Agenda, will provide a forum for DEI scholars interested in inclusion, voice, and psychological safety in high-stakes technical work, intersectional career dynamics and leadership pathways, and equity and inclusion across ecosystems where governance choices can lock in-or disrupt-inequality early in an industry's formation.
📍 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
------------------------------