Open Access
Higher Education Reform in Italy: Tightening Regulation Instead of Steering at a Distance
Davide Donina,Davide Donina,Michele Meoli,Stefano Paleari +3 more
- pp 94-112
TLDR
In this paper, a comprehensive reform (Law 240/2010, or ‘Gelmini reform’) changed the institutional governance and internal organization of Italian state universities and evaluated how it has affected the power-sharing arrangement and coordination mechanisms in the Italian higher education system thus far.Abstract:
In December 2010, a comprehensive reform (Law 240/2010, or ‘Gelmini reform’) changed the
institutional governance and internal organization of Italian state universities. This paper describes
the new legal framework and evaluates how it has affected the power-‐sharing arrangement and
coordination mechanisms in the Italian higher education system thus far, by analysing the following
governance dimensions: external regulation, external guidance, competition, academic self-‐
governance, and managerial self-‐governance. Though Law 240 was presented as a fundamental
change with respect to the traditional Italian governance regime, based on detailed state regulation
and academic self-‐governance, it did not have any substantial impact on power distribution. The
policy suffers from strong path dependency, presenting only reactions to solve previous
inefficiencies, and stimulating adaptive behaviours of Italian universities. Law 240 does not depict a
new governance regime for the Italian higher education, and bureaucratic fulfilment remains the
dominant approach for universities.read more
Citations
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Self-citations as strategic response to the use of metrics for career decisions
TL;DR: In this article, the authors studied the opportunistic use of self-citations, i.e. citations of one's own work to boost metric scores, in the Italian Higher Education system, where promotion to professorial positions is regulated by a national habilitation procedure that considers the number of publications and citations received.
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University support and the creation of technology and non-technology academic spin-offs
TL;DR: In this paper, a longitudinal study of 559 spin-offs from 85 Italian universities from 1999 to 2013 was conducted, and the authors found that although stronger administrative support from the parent university leads academics to create more technology spin-off, a U-shaped relationship instead exists between the number of administrative staff within a university and the rate of establishment of non-technology spinoff.
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Performance-based funding and university research productivity: the moderating effect of university legitimacy
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the change in research productivity experienced by Italian universities following the introduction of the first Performance-based Research Funding System (PRFS) in 2003, focusing on the moderating effect of university legitimacy.
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Work-Life Interferences in the Early Stages of Academic Careers: The Case of Precarious Researchers in Italy.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors address the topic of work-life interferences in academic contexts, focusing on early career researchers in the Italian university system, and reveal how the ongoing process of precarization is affecting both the everyday working activities and the private and family lives of early-career researchers.
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University spatial competition for students: the Italian case
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used a competing destinations model on the student flows to 75 Italian universities in the period 2003-12, and modelling university competition with respect to different market segmentations, provided evidence that Italian universities operated under competition forces in the last decade.
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