Higher education policy in practice: digitalization and the governance reform in an Italian university (1988-2021)

ABSTRACT

Academic research has extensively inspected the changing modes of governance in higher education systems through systemic and comparative research. This article aims to investigate these processes from a different perspective and vantage point. In particular, the translation of (trans)national instances into local micro-policy and practice is examined by historicising the social construction of digitalisation as a policy field in an Italian university over three decades (1988–2021). The emergence of knowledge and power arrangements across the complex entanglement of broader cultural history and local microhistory is thus examined. A hybrid configuration emerges in the observed university that features aspects from both its legacy bureaucratic mode of governance and the entrepreneurial paradigm. These institutional dynamics are consistent with wider systemic patterns in Italian higher education. The divergence between planned policy change and experienced realities is thus confirmed.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• Italy
• governance
• microhistory
• translation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Christine Musselin, La Longue Marche des Universités Françaises (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001).

² John Clarke and Janet Newman, The Managerial State: Power, Politics and Ideology in the Remaking of Social Welfare (London: Sage, 1997).

³ Guy Neave and Frans van Vught, Prometheus Bound: The Changing Relationship between Government and Higher Education in Western Europe (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1991); Clarke and Newman, The Managerial State; Guy Neave, ‘The Evaluative State Reconsidered’, European Journal of Education 33, no. 3 (1998): 265–84; Romuald Normand, The Changing Epistemic Governance of European Education: The Fabrication of the Homo Academicus Europeanus? (Cham: Springer, 2016).

⁴ J.P. Olsen, ‘Administrative Reform and Theories of Organization’, in Organising Governance: Governing Organizations, ed. C. Campbell and B. G. Peters (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988), 233–54; Neave, ‘The Evaluative State Reconsidered’.

⁵ Åse Gornitzka and Peter Maassen, ‘Hybrid Steering Approaches with Respect to European Higher Education’, Higher Education Policy 13, no. 3 (2000): 267–85; Roberto Moscati et al., ‘Marketization and Managerialization of Higher Education Policies in a Comparative Perspective’, in Restructuring Welfare Governance, ed. Klenk Tanja and Pavolini Emmanuele (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2015), 46–72.

⁶ Neil Selwyn, Digital Technology and the Contemporary University: Degrees of Digitisation (London: Routledge, 2014); José van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martijn De Waal, The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Paolo Landri, Digital Governance of Education: Technology, Standards and Europeanisation of Education (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

⁷ Giliberto Capano, ‘Government Continues to Do Its Job: A Comparative Study of Governance Shifts in the Higher Education Sector’, Public Administration 89, no. 4 (2011): 1622–42.

⁸ van Dijck, Poell and De Waal, The Platform Society; Mathias Decuypere and Paolo Landri, ‘Governing by Visual Shapes: University Rankings, Digital Education Platforms and Cosmologies of Higher Education’, Critical Studies in Education 62, no. 1 (2021): 17–33; Ben Williamson, ‘Making Markets through Digital Platforms: Pearson, Edu-Business, and the (e) Valuation of Higher Education’, Critical Studies in Education 62, no. 1 (2021): 50–66.

⁹ Lucas Cone et al., ‘Pandemic Acceleration: Covid-19 and the Emergency Digitalization of European Education’, European Educational Research Journal 21, no. 5 (2021): 845–68; Sotiria Grek and Paolo Landri, ‘Editorial: Education in Europe and the COVID-19 Pandemic’, European Educational Research Journal 20, no. 4 (2021): 393–402.

¹⁰ Burton R. Clark, The Higher Education System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Neave and Vught, Prometheus Bound; Clarke and Newman, The Managerial State: Power, Politics and Ideology in the Remaking of Social Welfare; Michael Dobbins, ‘Convergent or Divergent Europeanization? An Analysis of Higher Education Governance Reforms in France and Italy’, International Review of Administrative Sciences 83, no. 1 (2017): 177–99.

¹¹ Normand, The Changing Epistemic Governance of European Education; Elizabeth Alexander, Wendy Phillips and Dharm Kapletia, ‘Shifting Logics: Limitations on the Journey from “State” to “Market” Logic in UK Higher Education’, Policy & Politics 46, no. 4 (2018): 551–69; Gioia Pompili and Assunta Viteritti, ‘Challenges in Higher Education: Teaching Innovation between Experimentation and Standardization’, Scuola Democratica, no. 3 (2020): 417–36.

¹² Martin Lawn and Sotiria Grek, Europeanising Education: Governing a New Policy Space (London: Symposium, 2012); Normand, The Changing Epistemic Governance of European Education; Dorthe Staunæs, Katja Brøgger and John Benedicto Krejsler, ‘How Reforms Morph as They Move: Performative Approaches to Education Reforms and Their Un/Intended Effects’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 31, no. 5 (2018): 345–52.

¹³ Barbara Czarniawska and Bernward Joerges, ‘Travels of Ideas’, in Translating Organizational Change, ed. Barbara Czarniawska and Guje Sevón (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), 13–48.

¹⁴ Bruno Latour, ‘On Technical Mediation’, Common Knowledge 3, no. 2 (1994): 29–64.

¹⁵ Ibid., 32.

¹⁶ Barbara Czarniawska and Bernward Joerges, ‘Winds of Organizational Change: How Ideas Translate into Objects and Actions’, in Research in the Sociology of Organizations: Studies of Organizations in the European Traditions, ed. Samuel Bacharach, Pasquale Gagliardi and Bryan Mundell (London: JAI Press, 1995), 171–210.

¹⁷ Barbara Czarniawska and Guje Sevón, Translating Organizational Change (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011).

¹⁸ Curtis A. Brewer, ‘Historicizing in Critical Policy Analysis: The Production of Cultural Histories and Microhistories’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 27, no. 3 (2014): 273–88.

¹⁹ Cultural history aims at interpreting past events to unveil the underlying cultural and social forces presumed to be in operation. It particularly focuses on history from below, history of everyday life, history of material culture, history of mentalités, and the emphasis on the agency and creativity of historical subjects. See Peter Burke, What Is Cultural History? (London: Wiley, 2019).

²⁰ Microhistory is understood as an attempt to illuminate vast social and cultural issues through the intensive historical investigation of a relatively well-defined smaller object whose agency is stressed in the face of the broader underlying forces of history. See Carlo Ginzburg, John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi, ‘Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It’, Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (1993): 10–35; Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon and István M. Szijártó, What Is Microhistory?: Theory and Practice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013).

²¹ Sue Winton and Curtis A. Brewer, ‘People for Education: A Critical Policy History’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 27, no. 9 (2014): 1091–109.

²² Dobbins, ‘Convergent or Divergent Europeanization?’, 188.

²³ Burton R. Clark, Academic Power in Italy: Bureaucracy and Oligarchy in a National University System (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).

²⁴ Capano, ‘Government Continues to Do Its Job’.

²⁵ Ibid., 1627.

²⁶ Clarke and Newman, The Managerial State.

²⁷ Clark, The Higher Education System, 143.

²⁸ Capano, ‘Government Continues to Do Its Job’; Dobbins, ‘Convergent or Divergent Europeanization?’.

²⁹ Matteo Turri, ‘The Difficult Transition of the Italian University System: Growth, Underfunding and Reforms’, Journal of Further and Higher Education 40, no. 1 (2016): 83–106.

³⁰ Stefano Boffo, Pierre Dubois and Roberto Moscati, ‘Changes in University Governance in France and in Italy’, Tertiary Education and Management 14, no. 1 (2008): 13–26; Damiano De Rosa, ‘Hic Sunt Leones – When Ideas Don’t Meet Policies: Italy and the Reform of Higher Education’, Anali Hrvatskog Politološkog Društva: Časopis Za Politologiju 9, no. 1 (2012): 359–69; Moscati et al., ‘Marketization and Managerialization of Higher Education Policies in a Comparative Perspective’.

³¹ Moscati et al., ‘Marketization and Managerialization of Higher Education Policies in a Comparative Perspective’, 46–7.

³² Clark, The Higher Education System.

³³ Rosaria Lumino, Dora Gambardella and Emiliano Grimaldi, ‘The Evaluation Turn in the Higher Education System: Lessons from Italy’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 49, no. 2 (2017): 87–107.

³⁴ Paul R. Trowler, Academic Tribes and Territories (London: McGraw-Hill, 2001).

³⁵ Giliberto Capano, ‘Looking for Serendipity: The Problematical Reform of Government within Italy’s Universities’, Higher Education 55, no. 4 (2008): 481–504.

³⁶ Edoardo Ongaro and Giovanni Valotti, ‘Public Management Reform in Italy: Explaining the Implementation Gap’, International Journal of Public Sector Management 21, no. 2 (2008): 174–204.

³⁷ Boffo, Dubois and Moscati, ‘Changes in University Governance in France and in Italy’; Roberto Moscati, ‘Autonomy for What? The University Mission in a Centralised Higher Education System – the Case of Italy’, International Trends in University Governance 20, no. 2/3 (2014): 89–104; Giliberto Capano, Marino Regini and Matteo Turri, Changing Governance in Universities: Italian Higher Education in Comparative Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Giliberto Capano, ‘Policy Design Spaces in Reforming Governance in Higher Education: The Dynamics in Italy and the Netherlands’, Higher Education 75, no. 4 (2018): 675–94.

³⁸ Capano, ‘Looking for Serendipity’, 486.

³⁹ Michael Dobbins and Christoph Knill, ‘Italy: The “Outsmarted” State?’, in Higher Education Governance and Policy Change in Western Europe: International Challenges to Historical Institutions, ed. Michael Dobbins and Christoph Knill (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 79–109.

⁴⁰ Giliberto Capano and Simona Piattoni, ‘From Bologna to Lisbon: The Political Uses of the Lisbon “Script” in European Higher Education Policy’, Journal of European Public Policy 18, no. 4 (2011): 584–606.

⁴¹ Lawn and Grek, Europeanising Education; Normand, The Changing Epistemic Governance of European Education.

⁴² Gianfranco Rebora and Matteo Turri, ‘Governance in Higher Education: An Analysis of the Italian Experience’, in International Perspectives on the Governance of Higher Education: Alternative Frameworks for Coordination, ed. Huisman Jeroen (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 39–58.

⁴³ Michael Dobbins and Christoph Knill, ‘Higher Education Governance in France, Germany, and Italy: Change and Variation in the Impact of Transnational Soft Governance’, Policy and Society 36, no. 1 (2017): 67–88.

⁴⁴ Emanuela Reale and Bianca Potì, ‘Italy: Local Policy Legacy and Moving to an “In Between” Configuration’, in University Governance: Western European Comparative Perspectives, ed. Catherine Paradeise et al. (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2009), 77–102.

⁴⁵ Dobbins, ‘Convergent or Divergent Europeanization?’.

⁴⁶ Martina Dal Molin, Matteo Turri and Tommaso Agasisti, ‘New Public Management Reforms in the Italian Universities: Managerial Tools, Accountability Mechanisms or Simply Compliance?’, International Journal of Public Administration 40, no. 3 (2017): 256–69; Lumino, Gambardella and Grimaldi, ‘The Evaluation Turn in the Higher Education System: Lessons from Italy’.

⁴⁷ Neave, ‘The Evaluative State Reconsidered’.

⁴⁸ Capano, Regini and Turri, Changing Governance in Universities.

⁴⁹ Clark, Academic Power in Italy.

⁵⁰ De Rosa, ‘Hic Sunt Leones’; Turri, ‘The Difficult Transition of the Italian University System’.

⁵¹ Sapienza university has been chosen as an empirical field due to its exemplarity. It is the public, non-virtual and non-confederate university with the highest number of enrolled students in Europe (119,985 enrolled students; data: academic year 2020/2021). As a reference, the next largest Italian universities by enrolled students are Bologna (90,291 enrolled students; data: academic year 2020/2021) and Naples (74,983 enrolled students; data: academic year 2020/2021). Data are drawn from the Higher Education Data Portal by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR, 2022).

⁵² A total of 16 privileged witnesses have been interviewed who worked in Sapienza as governance staff (7) or IT specialists (9). The average duration of interviews was 62 minutes. All excerpts from archive material and interviews have been translated from Italian to English by the author. Pseudonymisation was applied on the research partners’ names to mitigate the possibility that contextual information provided could lead to ‘deductive disclosure’ of their identities. See Karen Kaiser, ‘Protecting Respondent Confidentiality in Qualitative Research’, Qualitative Health Research 19, no. 11 (2009): 1632–41.

⁵³ Marina Mastroluca, ‘Ecco il Libretto Scaccia-Code’, L’Unità, July 27, 1988, 20.

⁵⁴ Czarniawska and Joerges, ‘Travels of Ideas’.

⁵⁵ Lawn and Grek, Europeanising Education; Normand, The Changing Epistemic Governance of European Education.

⁵⁶ Sapienza, ‘Piano Strategico 2007–2012. Versione 2.0’, 2007, 4, https://www.uniroma1.it/sites/default/files/PianoStrategico2007_2012.pdf.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 52.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 65.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 55.

⁶⁰ Sapienza, ‘Senato Accademico – 23-10-2007’, 2007, http://www2.uniroma1.it/senatoaccademico/verbali/verbale2007-10-23.htm.

⁶¹ Ibid.

⁶² Frati, Luigi. ‘Appunti per il dibattito’, 2008. https://web.archive.org/web/20201021050749/https://sites.google.com/site/perquattroanni/. Emphasis in the original.

⁶³ Founded in 1967, CINECA (Northeastern Interuniversity Consortium for Automatic Computing) is composed today of around 80 higher education institutions, as well as ANVUR and the Ministry of University and Research itself.

⁶⁴ Interestingly, university access to Microsoft licences and services is now mediated by the Rectors’ Conference of Italian Universities (CRUI) on the basis of an Educational Transformation Agreement arranged with Microsoft.

⁶⁵ Cone et al., ‘Pandemic Acceleration’.

⁶⁶ Stephen Ball and Deborah Youdell, Hidden Privatisation in Public Education (Brussels: Education International, 2007).

⁶⁷ Arpad Szakolczai, Reflexive Historical Sociology (London: Routledge, 2003); Massimiliano Vaira, ‘The Permanent Liminality Transition and Liminal Change in the Italian University: A Theoretical Framework and Early Evidences’, in Global Challenges, Local Responses in Higher Education, ed. Jelena Brankovic et al. (Rotterdam: Sense, 2014), 191–208.

⁶⁸ See the third section of this paper. See also, among others: Capano, ‘Looking for Serendipity’; Eliana Minelli, Gianfranco Rebora and Matteo Turri, ‘Waiting for the Market: Where Is the Italian University System Heading?’, Higher Education Policy 25, no. 1 (2012): 131–45; Turri, ‘The Difficult Transition of the Italian University System’; Capano, ‘Policy Design Spaces in Reforming Governance in Higher Education’.

⁶⁹ Czarniawska and Sevón, Translating Organizational Change.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leonardo Piromalli

Leonardo Piromalli, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Researcher at ‘Sapienza’ University of Rome (Department of Communication and Social Research) and an Adjunct Professor at University of Cagliari (Department of Pedagogy, Psychology, Philosophy) and University of L’Aquila (Department of Human Studies). His research interests lie at the intersection of Higher Education Studies and Science and Technology Studies. He undertakes research on knowledge practices and processes, higher education governance and policy-making, platforms and infrastructure, and teaching and learning.