4

Geographical mobility is often advocated in the context of management career paths, and its individual and societal challenges have been widely emphasized in the management sciences. In this article, we go against this dominant model by highlighting the role of geographic ties in the professional career of executives in small businesses (SB). A mixed methodology is used in order, on the one hand, to compare the early career situations of young managers in large and small businesses. On the other hand, our goal is to examine the factors shaping professional careers in small businesses, while exploring the concept of geographic attachment. Our analysis therefore focuses on quantitative and qualitative data, the former being from a national survey on integration and mobility, Generation 2010, conducted with 26,860 executives recently out of training. In terms of the latter, we collected twenty-five life stories from executives in small businesses with more than ten years of professional experience. Overall, young managers in small companies (less than fifty employees) are less geographically mobile and less inclined to change regions than young managers in large businesses (LBs). Above all, our results reveal a lower level of geographic mobility among SB executives. Their professional careers are differentiated from that of managers in LBs, with their inclination toward small companies reflecting certain life choices. We also identified three dimensions of geographic ties: affective and identity-related, economic, and the local quality of life, all of which appear to play a decisive role in shaping managers’ career paths.