Homeward bound or urban aspirations? Unraveling rural–urban migrant workers’ decision to return through hometown embeddedness and city embeddedness

Return migration of rural-to-urban migrant (RUM) manufacturing workers incurs major disruption and costs to global supply chains, while threatening export-driven economic growth in emerging economies. To clarify the etiology of this key driver of factory attrition, we integrate theories of expatriate repatriation, multifocal job embeddedness, and the turnover-intention conversion process to derive a framework delineating push-and-pull forces underlying RUM laborers’ return to provincial homes. Specifically, our model specifies how host-city embeddedness comprising pull-to-stay forces discourages home return, whereas hometown embeddedness representing pull-to-leave forces encourages such return. We further posit that critical events prompting thoughts of returning home induce return intentions, while specifying that hometown embeddedness facilitates how such intentions translate into actual return. We validated this model by surveying 1673 Chinese RUM workers and tracking their subsequent return migration. Our findings sustained the push-and-pull forces undergirding intended migration, while revealing that hometown embeddedness increases the likelihood that intended return materializes into actual return.