The Space Economy (SE) offers a distinctive context for advancing research in the Careers Division (CAR). It concentrates many of the career phenomena that are central to contemporary careers scholarship: rapid occupational emergence, boundary-spanning work, institutional constraint, and high-stakes project environments.
For CAR scholars, the SE provides a rich empirical setting for examining how individuals build employability, develop skill portfolios, and navigate career transitions when roles evolve quickly and competency requirements are not yet standardized. As the sector scales, organizations face a growing tension between the demand for scarce, specialized expertise and the need for more integrative profiles often described as T-shaped or V-shaped capabilities that combine deep technical knowledge with cross-functional coordination, systems thinking, and strategic judgment.
The SE also sharpens how institutions shape careers. Public procurement, safety and certification regimes, and security requirements often structure access to projects, knowledge, and mobility in ways that differ from many other industries. At the same time, funding concentration and ecosystem dominance can shape opportunity structures for individuals and smaller firms, raising important questions about career inequality, cumulative advantage, and the emergence of career ladders within frontier ecosystems.
Careers in the SE are also frequently built across porous organizational boundaries (among agencies, primes, startups, suppliers, and universities) making the sector an ideal setting for studying boundaryless careers in practice, as well as the countervailing forces that re-impose boundaries through regulation, sovereignty concerns, and restricted knowledge flows.
Our PDW, Space Economy: Consolidating a Research Agenda, will provide a forum for CAR scholars interested in career adaptability and resilience under uncertainty, mobility and identity across hybrid public–private ecosystems, and how institutional architectures create or constrain opportunity in emerging sectors.
📍 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
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Mehdi Montakhabi
Associate Scholar
University of Oxford | Saïd Business School
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