The Space Economy (SE) offers an unusually strong empirical setting for advancing research in Organization Development and Change (ODC). It concentrates large-scale transformation under extreme constraints: high reliability and safety demands, long time horizons, capital intensity, and tight interdependence across public agencies, primes, startups, and research universities.
For ODC scholars, this makes the SE a powerful context for examining how organizations initiate, legitimize, implement, and sustain change when technologies, governance arrangements, and stakeholder values are shifting rapidly. The SE foregrounds classic change questions such as sensemaking, resistance, culture shift, and intervention design in settings where multiple logics collide and where failure has outsized costs.
Major transitions in the SE, including the shift from government-centric programs to hybrid public–private models, often trigger intensive work around meaning, identity, and legitimacy: what counts as mission success, who defines responsible change, and how competing coalitions negotiate new directions. Change in this domain is also rarely contained within a single organization; it propagates through contracts, standards, platform architectures, and interdependent supply networks, creating rich opportunities to study multi-actor change, governance hybridity, and cross-boundary coordination.
The SE also sharpens ODC questions around power, resistance, and legitimacy (including who benefits from "New Space" transformations, who bears the risks, and how contested change unfolds across legacy and entrepreneurial actors. In this sense, the SE offers a high-resolution context in which ODC theory and intervention research can surface mechanisms and boundary conditions that are often less visible in more routine change settings.
Our PDW, Space Economy: Consolidating a Research Agenda, will provide a forum for ODC scholars interested in change interventions in hybrid public–private ecosystems, managing speed–safety tensions while preserving learning and psychological safety, resistance and coalition dynamics, and the development of practical change playbooks for organizations navigating uncertainty and interdependence.
📍 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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