Challenging career models in higher education: the influence of internal career scripts and the rise of the “concertina” career

Abstract

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).

Aligning academic career management in the evolving landscape of Cambodian public universities

“…Internal alignment was the consistent coordination of management dimensions to select, develop and motivate employee performance. In the education sector, the changing parameters of academic labour have caused several misalignments of academic careers (Whitchurch et al, 2023). Therefore, several studies have been conducted to investigate this phenomenon.…”

“…Aligning management practices is paramount to developing academic careers in higher education across the globe (Whitchurch, 2023), as extensive studies have evidenced in the Academic career management in Cambodia…”

Barriers to attracting the best researchers: perceptions of academics in economics and physics in three European countries

“…National career opportunities may influence the attractiveness of academic positions, especially for tenured positions. National career systems differ in the length and nature of the pre-tenure period, the qualifications required to obtain a tenured position, and the valuation of experience by internal and external labor markets, that is, whether hiring is a question of success in systems other than one's own or whether career development occurs within a university, using its rules and incentives for career advancement (Musselin, 2010;Whitchurch et al, 2021).…”

Stigma and spoiled identities: rescripting career norms for precariously employed academic staff

“…Emerging evidence suggests academics with precarious contracts feel similar kinds of discrimination rooted in their contractual arrangements (Loveday 2018;UCU 2019). Therefore, there is a need to examine new ways for understanding the changing nature of academic careers and the implications for academic identity in a way that takes into account lived experiences of precarious academics and problematises structure, agency and identity (Kwiek 2019;Locke 2014;McAlpine and Amundsen 2016;Whitchurch, Locke, and Marini 2021). This paper therefore brings together Goffman's (1968) concept of stigma and Archer's (2000) work on career scripts and structure and agency as a new approach to examining this complexity.…”