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This paper is based on a study of women's transition from careers within organizations into self‐employment. It focuses on three key issues: the ways in which women accounted for their career transition, their decisions to opt for self‐employment, and the extent to which, in telling their stories, respondents engaged with emerging career discourses. First, this paper considers recent debates within the literature on women's exit from organizations, and emerging discourses of career and self‐employment, focusing on the position of women within these changing discourses. Research findings are then presented, examining three central themes: entrepreneurial orientation, dissatisfaction with the organization and balance of personal and professional life. The concluding section considers how women made sense of the web of factors involved in their career transition and reflects on whether indeed it is ‘time for a change’.

This paper examines the ways in which public sector research scientists make sense of and seek to develop their careers within their current organizational, policy, social and cultural contexts. It argues that to access such understandings, both structure and agency and the relationship between them need to be considered. Using empirical evidence from research in the United Kingdom and New Zealand, this paper further develops Barley's (1989) structuration model of career. It highlights the diverse (and frequently intersecting) institutional contexts in which research scientists seek to develop their careers, and their characteristic modes of engagement with such contexts, and utilizes the concept of career scripts to illustrate the dynamic interaction between these dimensions.