Seeking freelancers’ motivations to adopt an entrepreneurial career – a storytelling approach

The article focuses on worldwide freelancers’ stories as explanatory resources in understanding their reasons to embrace or not an entrepreneurial career in the future. It draws upon a qualitative study related on the motivations, benefits and risks of moving from freelancing to an entrepreneurial career, where participants to the survey freely expressed their perceptions, based on their genuine experiences. Data collected during the online survey have been analyzed with NVivo12 software. This qualitative analysis software allowed us to cluster the narratives of freelancers, based on the similarity of words contained in content, on the one hand, and provided a deeper understanding of sentiments related to freelancers’ intention to turn entrepreneurs, on the other hand. Following two principles: „No need to invent or reinvent yourself” and „Real life truths have the most impact”, freelancers who accepted our invitation to the survey highlighted their visions regarding the future career paths, providing an approach to understand their choice to become or not entrepreneurs. Freelancers’ career path can be more comprehensively described, understood and communicated using their stories, so storytelling has been considered the single methodology appropriate to this study objectives. Practical implications of this qualitative research, its limitations and further research avenues are also highlighted.