tl;dr: AOM 2025 brought planetary boundaries, postgrowth, and critique closer to the centre — but the structural tensions remain. Hopeful shifts, unfinished conversations.
2025 in Copenhagen marked my first in-person AOM since 2019 in Boston. I had joined the virtual meetings in 2020 and 2021, but skipped 2022 and 2023. Returning felt both familiar and strange — especially since this was the first AOM Annual Meeting ever held outside of North America. With around 13,000 participants, it was also the largest in the Academy’s history. That scale was palpable in every corridor, session, and impromptu conversation at the Bella Center — a byzantine maze of halls that took me three days to navigate.
This record turnout was more than a logistical milestone. It signaled a shift in the centre of gravity for management scholarship. Starting in 2030, AOM will return to Europe regularly, roughly every three years, with London (2030) and Amsterdam (2033) already confirmed. The conference’s location was no coincidence; it reflected broader transformations in where and how academic conversations are gaining traction. Copenhagen made one thing clear: Europe draws in more scholars than North America, especially the US. Given the political climate in the US, that trend is likely to intensify.
Several colleagues noted how the relative openness of European academic environments is creating space for themes that remain marginal in more metric-driven, tenure-dominated systems. These environments are not without their own pressures, but they seem to allow for a different kind of experimental ethos — one where ideas like degrowth, commons-based governance, and ecological embeddedness can take root with less friction.
Since 2009, the Academy of Management meeting has been a regular fixture in my academic calendar. The familiar rhythm was still there in Copenhagen — thousands of scholars, five days of presentations and debates — but this time, the question of what is happening to management as a scholarly field and practice felt more urgent, more fragmented, and at the same time more open than before. The atmosphere was tense but generative. It felt like something was shifting, but no one could quite name what.
Several themes stood out to me. The first was a return — or rather a struggle — to rethink management within planetary boundaries. At our PDW on “Organising Degrowth for an Equitable World,” we explored degrowth not as a strategy in the traditional sense, but as an ontological shift: away from optimization and toward regeneration, away from control and toward alignment with ecological limits. We need to organise otherwise — for human and non-human flourishing.
This call resonated across contributions. Robert Perey reminded us that ecosystems are not services but communities, grounding degrowth in ecocentric obligation. Léna Prouchet brought her research with Awajún communities into the room, showing how conservation basic income and Indigenous-led co-design reframe what care for the Earth can look like. Fergus Lyon challenged us to rethink governance: what does it mean to give nature a voice in institutions, in law, or on a board?
We asked: What kinds of institutions, behaviours, and values become thinkable once we stop assuming growth? And that question didn’t stay in our room alone. Across panels and workshops, I could sense that limits were re-entering the conversation — not as constraints to overcome but as structuring conditions. Whether framed as strong sustainability, ecological embeddedness, or post-extractivism, the idea that management must finally take planetary realities seriously was more present than in previous years.
Second, the idea of regeneration featured prominently. The PDW on the regenerative economy opened up thoughtful and open conversations on how to rethink economic flows, value creation, and interdependence. Strong sustainability, rebound effects, and planetary boundaries were no longer footnotes but central to the framing. And yet, one could sense a missing link: the conditions under which regeneration fails to take root. Ownership regimes, growth imperatives, and fiscal architectures were acknowledged but left largely unexplored.
What would it mean to regenerate not just ecosystems but the political economy itself? To redesign the structures that currently neutralize regenerative efforts through accumulation and extraction? That’s the shift still to come — a regenerative political economy, where growth is redefined not as endless expansion but as a dynamic rhythm: decay, renewal, flourishing. Growth as metabolism, not machine. We are only beginning to articulate what that might mean for how we organise, govern, and manage.
This brings me to critique. At the PDW on the state of critique in CMS, emotions ran high. In times of ecological breakdown and democratic erosion, many scholars feel the need to break silences. But I was left wondering: are we replacing one silence with another? When outrage hardens into certainty, disagreement becomes difficult. Complexity fades. We need critique that is uncomfortable, rigorous, and reflexive — not just a louder moral voice. We need critique that remains open. Between the urgency of crisis and the demand for clarity, it must find a third way — not compromise, but attentiveness. An attentiveness to history, to structural conditions, and to our own scholarly complicities.
Yet there were also affirming signs of progress. Our Degrowth PDW has found its place again. What began as a marginal initiative has grown into a small but persistent current within the Academy. The CMS and ONE divisions are increasingly open to postgrowth imaginaries. Systems thinking, though repeatedly forgotten and rediscovered, made another return, this time with calls to build infrastructure for its longevity — textbooks, publication venues, methodological clarity. And in discussions on ownership, commons, and postcapitalist governance, I heard echoes of a field that is slowly, unevenly, but noticeably shifting.
These moments point to something deeper: the search for alternatives is no longer only theoretical. It is becoming practical, even procedural. There is an appetite for frameworks, tools, and institutional mechanisms that can support what until recently were seen as fringe ideas. The question now is not just how to think differently, but how to organise, teach, and publish differently as well.
Back in 2017, I asked for a political turn in management research. In 2018, I called for more activism. In 2025, I feel the need for something quieter but no less demanding: staying with the trouble, holding the complexity, and refusing to trade rigour for righteousness. We are not there yet. But the conversation continues — and in its continuance lies a form of resistance. Perhaps the quiet work of making space, of building community, and of holding ambiguity is the most enduring contribution we can offer right now. I’m already curious to see how this evolves in the years ahead — and what shape the 2030 London meeting might give to these still-shifting undercurrents.