Chapter 26 Chance encounters, ecologies of ideas, and career paths: A personal narrative of my Stanford years

Abstract

As I have reflected upon the last thirty years, since it was precisely thirty years ago that I started as a student at Stanford, I have wondered if there is an overall theme to how my professional career has unfolded and the role Stanford played in it. I believe Albert Bandura's (1982) paper, The Psychology of Chance Encounters and Life Paths, provides a good descriptive framework to work with. I am persuaded that at various points of time as I stood at the proverbial fork in the road, due to one chance factor or another, my decision was tipped one way. This is not to suggest that my career has been a sequence of random events; quite the contrary. While the specific fortuitous events occurred largely outside my control, my responses to them were quite systematic; some fortuitous events had lasting influence, and some even changed my life trajectory. But, what I am struck by, ex post, is that in 1973, as I was just finishing my undergraduate education in India, the ex ante probability of my ending up some years later as a professor at an Ivy League university was essentially zero. Yet, this did eventually happen.

Citation

Singh, J.V. (2010), "Chapter 26 Chance encounters, ecologies of ideas, and career paths: A personal narrative of my Stanford years", Bird Schoonhoven, C. and Dobbin, F. (Ed.) Stanford's Organization Theory Renaissance, 1970–2000 (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 28), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 395-408. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X(2010)0000028030