The paper develops the metaphorical concept of the “concertina” career to describe ways in which academic staff, across a diversifying workforce, modulate their interactions with institutional career frameworks, which tend to be unilinear and to be characterised by detailed progression criteria and milestones. In doing this, they are guided by Internal career scripts, providing an additional dimension to the dichotomy of boundaried and boundaryless careers found in the literature. Drawing on a longitudinal study between 2017 and 2020, of forty-nine mid-career academic staff across eight UK universities, consideration is given to individuals’ spatial movements, for instance, between academic activities, and professional and personal commitments; and the manipulation of timescales to accelerate or decelerate career progress in relation to opportunities and constraints. The study shows ways in which the spatial parameters of a career are being stretched in order to accommodate new forms of academic work supplementing disciplinary activity, such as online learning, employability initiatives and public engagement, as well as work-life considerations. In addition, individuals are adapting timescales to accommodate professional activities such as health practice or community outreach, as well as personal commitments such as caring responsibilities. Thus, in the concertina career, individuals expand and contract activity, as well as extending and compressing timescales. As a result, it is concluded that institutional career models do not entirely reflect the reality of career-making by individuals, which is likely to involve detours (therefore a spatial dimension) and a disruption of assumed timelines (therefore a temporal dimension).

本文开发了“六角琴”职业的隐喻概念，以描述学术人员在多样化的劳动力中如何调节他们与机构职业框架的互动，这些框架往往是单线的，并以详细的进步标准和里程碑为特征。在这样做时，他们以内部职业脚本为指导，为文献中发现的有界和无界职业的二分法提供了额外的维度。借鉴 2017 年至 2020 年间对八所英国大学的 49 名处于职业生涯中期的学术人员的纵向研究，考虑了个人的空间运动，例如在学术活动、专业和个人承诺之间；以及操纵时间尺度以加速或减速与机会和限制相关的职业发展。该研究展示了如何扩展职业空间参数以适应补充学科活动的新形式的学术工作，例如在线学习、就业能力倡议和公众参与，以及工作与生活的考虑。此外，个人正在调整时间表以适应专业活动，例如健康实践或社区外展，以及个人承诺，例如照顾责任。因此，在六角琴的职业生涯中，个人扩大和收缩活动，以及延长和压缩时间尺度。因此，