From Lucky Events to Durable Social Consequences: A Taxonomy of Propagation Mechanisms

Sociological research increasingly treats luck as consequential chance rather than as a personal trait. Existing work has established that random events can shape life‐course outcomes, inequality and cumulative advantage, but it remains less clear how the consequences of a lucky event are transmitted through time. This article develops a taxonomy of five propagation mechanisms: direct positional transmission, actor‐mediated conversion, relational validation, institutional embedding and compensatory buffering. The mechanisms differ in whether interpretive uptake or actor action is required, in the social carrier of the event effect, in expected temporal persistence and in the empirical designs needed to identify them. The framework therefore separates the occurrence of luck from its subsequent social fate: a lucky event may be amplified, preserved, attenuated, dissipated or reversed. Psychological beliefs about personal luck are treated as optional feedback mechanisms. The taxonomy extends existing work on cumulative and compensatory advantage by decomposing the downstream effect of consequential chance into analytically distinct pathways. An application to the Matthew effect illustrates how similar aggregate persistence can arise through different social mechanisms. The framework provides a basis for comparative empirical research on when chance becomes durable inequality and when institutions prevent it from doing so.