LAUSR

As mymentor and my sole dissertation advisor, James March, or Jim as I remember him, was essential in shaping my views on the fundamental issues of organization studies. He had a great, agile mind that was capable of pushing beyond any limits. More importantly, he was a good teacher to me. He nurtured his students to grow in his unique ways. I remember Jim’s students often meeting with him for private discussions. In the spring of 1999, I began my own near weekly discussions with him. The talks varied across academic topics and ideas. They went on until the year 2003, the year I graduated from Stanford. Many of my meetings with Jim were of the brainstorming sort: they produced no ‘tangible’ or ‘publishable’ results, but they shaped my thinking and helped me mature into the type of academic standards deemed appropriate by Jim. Aside from those weekly meetings and the painful, yet fruitful, dissertation process, I closely worked with Jim during our project related to the evolution of the field for organization studies. The paper, ‘Notes on the evolution of a research community: Organization studies in Anglophone North America, 1945–2000’, was later published in 2005 in Organization Science (Augier, March, & Sullivan, 2005). I was also honored to witness (as a liaison, somewhat) to the formation and publication in 2005 of Jim’s MOR paper ‘Parochialism in the Evolution of a Research Community: The Case of Organization Studies’ (March, 2005). While published earlier than our evolution of the field project, the MOR piece was an extension of the research we were doing for the evolution paper. Jim’s pervasive influence on my academic career are obvious and profound. First of all, I became a full believer in bounded rationality under Jim’s tutelage. Before I entered the Stanford Graduate School of Business, I had convictions that human beings are limited in terms of ability and moral capacities. The idea of bounded rationality for organizational decision-makers, thus, was highly resonant with my own personal convictions. However, it was not until I started closely working with Jim did I have a better understanding of the theory of bounded Management and Organization Review 15:4, December 2019, 891–894 doi: 10.1017/mor.2019.46