How Universities institutionalize ‘good’ managerial practices? Some evidence from the Italian cultural sector (original) (raw)

In the «society of knowledge» where we live, the universities play a key role: they have a very strong social utility and they are characterized as «political subject» in the cultural, social and economic processes” (CRUI, 2006). The principle sanctioned allows us to bring out, in a certain manner, the natural tension of the university system to quality, understood as the pursuit of excellence. That is to say that all the problematic areas and the ones with undisputed success, within the larger university governance, need to be dealt with a fundamental principle: University is and must remain an institution intended to provide a public function, to serve the national community and the institutional and social realities operating upon territorial contexts. It has to be committed to play the role of the central node in the dense network of relationships that make up the European transnational system, aiming at growing and sharing the knowledge and the critical transmission of it, in order to reach quality and excellence. In this regard, it is appropriate a brief circumscription of the concepts of quality and excellence, that act as public governance driver. The quality, generally understood, configures the ability of the actor to “transform”, increase and add value to a good or service (quality as “value added”) or to achieve results above the baseline standard (quality as excellence). For quality, in this analysis, we mean the degree in which the characteristics of the training and research system meet the requirements, or rather, the degree of closeness between predetermined objectives and results obtained. The definition of this goal brings into the game the ability of the university system as a whole, responsible of providing guidelines, and the individual actors who act at the local level, to choose value targets and achieve them, adopting behaviors necessary to measure and improve the proximity between objectives and results (Sirilli, 2010). It should be noted that the determination of objectives by the university system, and then by its actors, as well as its value and suitability, must take into account the priorities or the expectations arriving from the demand for training and the planning lines issued by the Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR). That is to say that universities, planning their offer as well as the same way to deliver the service, recognize the need to adapt to the ministerial directives, in line with the dispositions to be found in the changed institutional framework. At the same time, universities may not give rise to a planning free from the expectations of the target market and, therefore, the requests from the labor market. The actions taken in the view of the planning of objectives for higher education and, at the same time, the implementation of these programmatic guidelines, should be planned and systematized, with the aim of producing adequate confidence that processes for training and research are effective as a whole, in order to Quality Assurance (QA). (ANVUR, 2012) This considerations, in fact, allow us to trace specific objectives attributable to the public university system as a whole, simultaneously framing the governance of Italian universities because of the natural tendency previously recognized, as government bodies adjusted to the current historical context and consistent with the role they have to play in it. It should be added that today the Italian universities are actors operating within a system governed according to the principle of autonomy that, although constitutionally guaranteed, is actually limited because of the number of regulatory constraints that guide the decision-making processes, as well as, by the action of the socio-political and institutional context in which these constraints are formalized. The institutional pressure, and then legislative, that now sings the praises of the start of the change by the actors involved in the university governance, find a widely formalization in the process of constant adaptation of the choices made within the universities with respect to the continuous updating of the legislation. In this regard it should be took into account that in the perspective of effective governance, the concept of autonomy must be linked with that of responsibility of universities, sometimes undermined by accusations of self-referentiality received from several parts (both special "stakeholders”, even members of the government bodies) against the teaching staff and the same technical and administrative staff, realizing in this way a "co- management in a consortium logic that has no other examples in the public administration" (CRUI, 2006). In this perspective, the allocation of resources has to be based on merit and goals achieved and with a ‘managerial conduct’, it being understood the inability to fully assimilate academic and business organizations. It happened that an indissoluble link between autonomy and responsibility becomes a prerequisite for the proper functioning of the university system. In this regard, it is clear that the terms used here (autonomy, responsibility, merit, management) underlie a culture that is hardly findable in most Italian universities and, anyway, of public management matrix. The reforms undertaken by government institutions can be a mere flatus vocis, to record an effective cultural change but what makes the conduct imperative was and remains a perception of competitiveness widespread among universities. Without going too much in that direction, it is clearly recognizable that where ‘licenses’ issued by the various universities are equivalent and all have the same legal value, competitive pressures between universities will never become active and demonstrated. So any centralized and imposed design tending to the cultural change of the university system could appear with no real effectiveness, tended to justify other objectives, or incoherent, coactus volui (forced, I wanted). (Nigro, Iannuzzi, 2009) The dynamics of governance of Italian universities seem, therefore, now more than ever suspended between demands for autonomy, ascribed to the regulatory framework, and political pressure from the key institutional actors. The risk that the bodies responsible for the government of the Italian university organizations are racing is that, failing to independently interpret requests from the central organs through the new regulatory guidance, therefore binding, they are not able to act as autonomous subjects (stimulating de facto the competition between universities), but rather incur an “homogenization boost” of performance and, upstream, of the choices of managerial nature. The fact remain that the Central Government have to achieve “uniformity of the starting points”, a prerequisite for autonomy system that cannot be performed. The considerations so far suggested lead to the hypothesis that the dynamics of governance in the Italian university organizations are aware of the processes of decoupling, having ceremonial character and intended as a disconnection between the actions undertaken formally - aimed to respond to institutional pressures and to the likely legitimacy of itself - and what is the true extent of the same actions - resulting mainly from the organizational culture leaving sediment in organizations (Kalev, Dobbin, Kelly, 2006; Oliver, 1991; Orton, Weick, 1990; Maclean, Behnam, 2010; Crilli, Zollo, Hansen, 2012). In fact, the possibility to hypothesize the processes of decoupling moves, in the prosecution of contribution, from a theoretical framing of the issue in the situationist perspective, between action and institutionalization, and from the reconstruction of the institutional pressures that lead university organizations, operating in the same organizational field, to resemble each other by adopting the same strategy. This is not the aim of achieving better performance, both in terms of effectiveness and economic efficiency, but in an attempt to collect social legitimacy. The decoupling would create “legitimacy façade”, as such is not aligned with the actual achievement of standards of excellence, but rather aimed at achieving results only apparently performing.