Exploring social media influencers' career construction : an inductive inquiry.

Abstract

The career of social media influencers has generated interest in the media over the last few years. Yet, very little attention has been paid to the career of those emergent actors in the research field. Our thesis aims to fill this gap in the scientific literature. Our research question is thus: how do influencers construct their career? Our aim is to understand how social media influencers construct their career, and to highlight the individual and contextual factors that influence their career construction. In order to answer our research question, we interview twelve social media influencers about their professional experiences, most particularly about their experience as social media influencers. We then conduct a narrative analysis. We identify various individual and contextual factors influencing social media influencers’ career construction. We then analyse our results in the light of Briscoe & Hall’s career profiles (2006) and of a combination of the career anchors models of Schein (1990), Bravo et al. (2017) and Marshall & Bonner (2003). We observe that influencers can be categorised in terms of career construction and identify three categories of influencers: the amateurs, the opportunists, and the entrepreneurs.