On the way to self-employment: the dynamics of career mobility

This qualitative study offers empirically-based explanations of the dynamics of career mobility trajectories to self-employment, a popular phenomenon in real life but less so in the literature. Embedded in the career ecosystem of an emerging-economy country, we investigate the mobility dynamics of people in different stages of their self-employment career. We conducted in-depth interviews with 35 individuals who opted for entrepreneurship or self-employed careers, and deploy the interpretive phenomenology to explore the dynamics of career mobility of self-employment. The results demonstrate different patterns of mobility between self- and paid employment during individuals’ career sequences. The different push and pull forces that influence mobility are identified and explained. The study advances the theories of career and entrepreneurship literature by not only illustrating the mobility dynamics of self-employment as a stage of one’s career but by also exploring the dynamic mechanisms of the mobility, drawing on the career ecosystem framework