Being Your Own Boss: Network Determinants of Young People’s Orientations Towards Self-Employment

Young people today are expected to navigate their precarious careers in an entrepreneurial way. Self-employment is gaining ground on wage labour as one attractive strategy for winning the battle with precariousness. From Granovetter’s studies to the present day, one of the most prolific lines of research on the factors influencing the strategies of job insertion emphasises the key importance of personal networks. Based on social capital theory, this article tests (1) whether the composition of young people’s personal networks is associated with their desire to move towards independent careers; and (2) whether, among the mechanisms associated with this orientation, there is the ability to mobilise contacts’ resources, for example, avoiding conflict and exploiting different forms of social support. Analysing data on the personal networks of a sample of 7827 young people in Switzerland, our results show that the orientation towards self-employment is more likely for those who access contacts with an unfavourable position in the labour market, such as people with lower educational levels and a foreign background. Although receiving social support plays a role, our results show that, for young people wishing to become self-employed, an even more important predictor is the presence of conflicts in their networks. In the context of the precarization of young people’s labour pathways, these results suggest that self-employment can serve as a coping strategy for the most vulnerable, as well as an escape from difficult relationships.