The Impact of Higher Education Reforms in Italy: Governance, Funding, and Interdisciplinarity

The dissertation analyses how reforms from 2010 to 2015 have affected governance, funding, and interdisciplinarity into the Italian higher education sector. A post-positivistic stance is adopted, through mixed method strategy, combining qualitative and quantitative techniques, and using multiple sources of evidence. Data generated from intertextual and qualitative analysis of the contents of official policy documents and university statutes are analysed and triangulated with statistical data retrieved from publicly available national databases, from ministerial decrees as well as from reports on the Italian higher education system. The first three articles analyse the governance at both systemic and institutional levels, the forth article addresses the public funding issue, while the last paper inspects the governance of interdisciplinarity into the Italian higher education system. Research contributions highlight the value of taking a more holistic perspective on policy and governance issues. The first article aims to evaluate Italian higher education reform according to broader public management narratives. In order to do this, it bridges the public management reform narratives to a model widely employed in higher education literature to evaluate the governance regime of higher education systems, devising thus a new analytical framework to assess higher education reform trajectories within public management narratives, and employs it to position the Italian case. The analysis shows that the public management narrative that complies to explain the Italian reform is the neo-Weberian one rather than new public management. This result brings out a gap in current higher education literature as it challenges the widely shared assumption that the Italian system is being reformed according to new public management trajectory. Concurrently, the article stresses that new public management is not the only way forward governments are employing to reform their higher education systems and further narratives can benefit higher education research. The papers on institutional governance confirm previous result, showing divergent interpretations of supra-national and national policies at governmental and institutional levels. The comparative paper with Portugal highlights divergences in organizational choices of universities in both countries with respect to the institutional governance model driven by new public management concepts, while the article focused on Italy shows that dissimilarities arise even when a unitary national regulation is implemented, and clusters Italian state universities into groups that made similar choices. Other research contributions also support the value of taking a more holistic perspective. Article on funding allocation reform shows that the analysis of a policy change alone can be misleading since it can fit within more public management reform narratives, while the article on the governance of interdisciplinarity stresses that it is the interaction of policies into several governance domains that is crucial to achieve a policy target. Policy and managerial implications of the findings are also discussed.