Engaging institutions in global careers: highly skilled self-initiated expatriates’ journeys through a Nordic welfare state

• This article responds to calls for more research that provides an institutional contextualization of self-initiated expatriation.
• It furthers the understanding of how self-initiated expatriates engage public institutions in constructing their global mobility and careers.
• The research is a field-based interview study of SIEs’ encounters with the institutions of a Nordic welfare state.
• It expands knowledge by showing how SIEs engage and potentially influence public institutions and discourses to further their global mobility and work experiences.

Recent years of research have highlighted the phenomenon of self-initiated expatriation and clarified the individual agency that underlies it, such as its motivational drivers, thereby depicting it as one form of boundaryless career. Yet as a consequence the role of wider institutional and structural contexts has been left under-theorized. This article provides a much needed examination of the interaction between institutional contexts and agency in self-initiated global careers. It advances the understanding of how self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) are influenced by and engage institutions in constructing their global mobility and careers. The research is a field-based study of SIEs’ encounters with the institutions of a Nordic welfare state and consists of interviews, observations, and document analyses. It makes a relevant addition to understanding how the self-directed expatriation of highly skilled professionals is institutionally moderated. It expands knowledge by showing how SIEs engage and potentially aim to influence public institutions and discourses to further their global mobility and work experiences and by providing a differentiated and distributed view of agency in self-initiated expatriation. While institutional environments condition global mobility and work experiences, they are potentially also influenced by the global talent that flows through them.