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New Space activities offer benefits for human progress and life beyond the Earth. However, there is a risk that the New Space Economy may develop according to an anthropocentric mindset favouring human progress and survival at the expense of all other species and the environment. This mindset raises concerns over the social and environmental impacts of space activities and the accountability of space actors. This research article explores the accountability of space actors by presenting a pluralistic accountability framework to understand, inspire and change accountability in the New Space Economy. This study also identifies future research opportunities.

This paper is a reflective and normative essay. The arguments are developed using contemporary multidisciplinary academic literature, publicly available evidence and examples. Further, the authors use Dillard and Vinnari's accountability framework to examine a pluralistic accountability system for space businesses.

The New Space Economy requires public and private entities to embrace hybrid and pluralistic accountability for their social and environmental impacts. A new way of seeing the relationship between human life, the Earth and celestial space is needed. Accounting language is used to mirror and mobilise broader forms of responsibility in those involved in space.

This paper responds to the AAAJ's special issue call for examining how accountability can be ensured in the New Space Age. The space activities businesses conduct, and the anthropocentric view inspiring their race toward space is concerning. Hence, the authors advocate the need for rethinking accountability between humans and nature. The paper contributes to fostering the debate on social and environmental accounting and the accountability of space actors in the New Space Economy. To this end, the authors use a pluralistic accountability framework to help understand how the New Space Economy can face the risks emanating from its anthropocentric mindset.

The space industry has experienced rapid development over the last few years. Activities such as building things in space, learning about our Earth and exploring outer space are satisfying people's fantasies and achieving humanity's ambitions. Such activities have also generated many issues that belong to several information systems (IS) research domains. In this article, the authors discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with the space economy.

The authors discuss why the emerging space economy opens a new frontier of e-commerce and data analytics. Linking three important IS research areas (i.e. digital commerce, data analytics and information security) to the space economy, this study motivates scholars to pay close attention to this promising new frontier for IS research.

The authors identify new research opportunities within several IS research contexts (digital commerce, data analytics and information security). The authors highlight the potential for opening a robust, interdisciplinary field in the IS domain that could provide valuable insights for practitioners and academics.

Because of the unique characteristics of the space economy, this article presents some promising avenues, research opportunities and implications for several IS fields (digital commerce, data analytics, decision science, information sharing and information security and new business models). Indeed, many opportunities are interdisciplinary in scope, with overlaps occurring between IS and other disciplines.

The emerging and rapidly growing space economy warrants initial analysis from an accounting lens. This article explores accounting's role in entity transactions involving outer space activities by addressing two questions: (1) What accounting challenges exist within a developing space economy? (2) What accounting research opportunities exist to address these challenges?

Background context introduces accounting scholars to the modern space economy and its economic infrastructure, providing insight on entity transactions involving activities in outer space. Detailed discussion and analysis of space accounting challenges and research opportunities reveal potential for a robust, interdisciplinary field in the accounting domain relevant for both practitioner and academic spheres. The article concludes with a summary investigation of the future exploration of accounting for space commerce.

Many accounting challenges and opportunities exist now and in the near future for accounting practitioners and scholars to contribute towards humanity's ambitious plans to achieve a sustained presence on the moon sometime during the 2020s and on Mars in the 2030s. All of accounting's traditional subject-matter domain, as well as sustainability accounting matters, will be relied upon in these efforts. Interdisciplinary inquiries and problem solving will be critical for success, with particular collaboration needs existing between accounting and operations management scholars.

This is the first paper to explore accounting for the burgeoning space economy, and to offer insight and guidance on the development of an emerging accounting subfield: space accounting.

This paper examines firm-level accountability and performance implications under a state-dominated institutional environment, China, for firms engaged in the space economy. Extant studies on the rapidly evolving civil space economy predominantly focus on developed Western economies at national or sector levels, frequently ignoring alternative institutional contexts. Additionally, limited attention has been given to firm-level empirical evidence and analysis, including corporate social responsibility (CSR) practice-R&D quality relationships in the space economy. The paper addresses each of these areas.

This paper utilises multiple regression, propensity score matching and split sampling methods applied to a proprietary dataset of Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange-listed A-share firms. Results are robust to endogeneity issues, alternative measurement of dependent variables and sampling.

China’s space firms demonstrate superior CSR performance to their counterparts in other sectors, supporting CSR‘s role in maintaining legitimacy. Their CSR practices also positively contribute to firm patent quality. The link is more pronounced among firms facing higher economic policy uncertainty and for state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The latter is due to SOEs’ government support, advantages in financing and attracting and retaining a high-quality workforce.

This paper adds to discussion on major space power’s, by examining China’s state-dominated civil space sector. It also addresses a lack of empirical firm-level evidence on space firm behaviour by examining the impact of firm-level CSR practices on R&D quality outcomes, areas in which there is a limited literature.

Incorporating local space, matter, and society into our concepts of the global in analytically compatible ways poses a major challenge for contemporary scholars of both world systems and globalization. Many analysts ignore both materiality and locality of production. They assume the global as their point of departure, and attempt to incorporate the local into it. In this chapter, we aim to reverse that logic. We will take into account and theorize the interaction of natural and social processes. In other words, we will integrate ecologic or materio-spatial logic with sociologic within the economic logic of global markets.

With current commercial space activities accelerating, the purpose of this paper is to contexualise enlivening the discipline of real estate law for outer space.

Drawing on essential topics in real estate law, contracts and insurance, this paper discusses these themes in their terrestrial and extra-terrestrial contexts.

Real estate law for the outer space environment carries many similarities to real estate law but also significant differences. At this early stage in human space exploration and travel, there is a need to deal more with goods/chattels (property assets); however, this will change as land – the Moon, asteroids, planets – are made available for mining and other activities. Given outer space activities carry high risk for spacecraft and humans, there are reciprocal lessons for real estate law and practice.

Real estate law for outer space is an area already in existence. However, as access to space develops further, particularly with inevitable human presence on the Moon and exploration to Mars, real estate law will also grow in importance and sophistication. Real estate law for outer space relies on contract and property law. These are levers for commercial activities, and a further array of complex law and governance – the Outer Space Treaties, international and national law, international custom, guidelines, codes and standards. Real estate law for space will require an interdisciplinary and global approach in an era where human needs are already reliant on goods and services derived from space, as well as in the quest for exploration beyond the earth and the moon itself.

The time is ripe for space law to be taken into nuanced areas, with real estate law being an important step. Entrenched into the combined real estate and outer space disciplinary context must be consideration of the environment (earth and beyond), sustainability, heritage protection issues, etc., as well as ensuring outer space has equitable opportunities for all nations and citizens.

Co-working spaces bundle all real estate services into a package and leverage shared economy trend to create new opportunities for growth. This sector is anticipated to expand significantly due to changes in mobility and office design driven by the development of remote or hybrid work settings. The current study attempts to identify key motivating factors for users in emerging economies in choosing co-working spaces.

Using analytic hierarchy process (AHP) methodology and the self-determination theory framework, a total of 4 criteria-level factors, along with 13 sub-criteria level factors were identified as key motivators for adapting to co-working spaces.

The study highlights a few factors and their relative importance, which could help firms/organizations to start or offer co-working spaces within emerging economies.

The study contributes to literature by advancing the understanding of key motivators for users of co-working spaces within the ambits of emerging economies. In the process, the authors enlist a few factors vis-à-vis their relative importance, which could help firms/organizations to start or offer co-working spaces within emerging markets.

A major obstacle regarding the measurement of an organization's sustainability and accountability in the space economy is defining the context and boundaries of commercial activity in outer space. Here, we introduce an ecosystem framework to address this obstacle. We utilize this framework to analyze the space mining sector. Our ecosystem framework sets the space mining sector's boundaries and helps a firm identify key stakeholders, activities, policies, norms and common pool resources in that sector and the interactions between them; a significant step in structuring how to measure space sustainability and accountability.

Borrowing theories and perspectives from a wide range of academic fields, this paper conducts a comprehensive context analysis of the space mining ecosystem.

Using our ecosystem framework to define the context and set boundaries for the space mining sector allowed us to identify sustainability-related issues in the sector and offer roadmaps to develop sustainability measures and standards.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first papers to introduce a framework to define boundaries in the global space economy and provides a tool to understand, measure and evaluate the space mining sector's environmental, social and economic issues.

Through an intervention from a geographical perspective on organizational space, this article aims to offer a new horizon in understanding international business strategy.

Starts with two interrelated questions: does space exist in organizations and how does an organization manipulate and produce this organizational space in order to gain competitive advantage? By tackling these questions in the context of international business activities, this paper engages existing (international) management theories.

This article critically reviews the narrow focus of most international business theories on physical location and distance as a significant determinant of foreign direct investment and diverse activities of transnational corporations (TNCs). Quantitative empirical studies in this genre tend to emphasize physical space as a mere “container” of different locations of TNC activities and to measure the distance between these locations as an independent variable in statistical models. Drawing upon recent theoretical developments in economic geography, the paper develops a relational perspective on business organizations. In such an organization space, there are no fixed locations manifesting themselves in physically measurable forms. Instead, locations and distances in an organizational space are relational and thus discursively constructed through actor‐specific strategies and practice. The paper argues that one key strategic goal of business organizations is to continuously expand its organizational space (viz. physical space) and to economize on this spatial expansion.

Reveals the need for a critical reexamination of existing management and organization theories to take account of how space and boundaries may influence the strategy, structure, and performance of business organizations.

Examines the properties of organizational space and applies the proposed concept to the case of TNCs.

This paper uses Leon Trotsky’s theory of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD) in order to transcend both globalising and methodologically nationalist theories of the global political economy. While uneven development theorists working in economic geography have demonstrated the logical corollary of capitalist development and the completion of the world market in the persistence of geographic unevenness, they fail to specify or problematise the role of states in this process. This leads to an ambiguity about why the states system has persisted under conditions of deep economic integration across states. State theorists, meanwhile, tend to exclude the world market and system of states as conditioning factors in state (trans)formation. For this reason, much state theory offers only a contingent account of the relationship between patterns of capital accumulation and states’ institutional forms. Geopolitical economy, with its focus on the competitive interrelations between states as constitutive of capitalist value relations, is well placed to transcend the pitfalls of these twin perspectives by closely engaging with the theory of UCD. UCD provides a nonreductionist means of integrating global processes of capital accumulation with their distinctive and peculiar national mediations. A research programme is developed to operationalise UCD for purposes of concrete research – something lacking from recent development in the field.