Performance-based university funding and the drive towards ‘institutional meritocracy’ in Italy

Abstract

Many countries, including Italy, are increasingly managing their public higher education systems in accordance with the New Public Management principle that private-sector management practices improve efficiency and quality. A key mechanism has been the introduction of performance-based funding systems designed to reward ‘high-performing’ institutions and incentivise ‘lesser-performing’ institutions to improve. Instead of improving efficiency and quality across the board, however, we argue that performance-based funding systems naturalise longstanding structurally determined inequalities between institutions by recasting national higher education systems as competitive institutional meritocracies in which institutional inequalities are redefined as objective indicators of intrinsic ‘merit’ or worth. We illustrate how performance-based university funding systems naturalise pre-existing inequalities between universities drawing on the case of Italy, a country characterised by longstanding inequalities between its northern and southern regions which demonstrably impact on the apparent ‘performance’ of universities. The concept of institutional meritocracy captures the illusory nature of this performance game.

Keywords:

• Bourdieu
• higher education
• meritocracy
• New Public Management
• performance-based funding
• university evaluation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In this article, we use the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) level 1 regional classification, developed by the European Union. See: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/345175/7451602/nuts-map-IT.pdf (accessed 14 May 2017).

2 This is an indicator developed by the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden which ‘gives an indication of the combined impact of the production volume and field normalized citation score of the analysed unit [university]’ (Rehn et al. 2014, 10). In the indicators used in this article, the Normalised Impact Score uses the publications published between 2005 and 2009, which in the context of this article means the data have been collected from the report on the state of Italian research in 2013 (ANVUR 2014, 590).

3 Data retrieved from ANVUR (2014, 590).

4 Data source: Anagrafe Nazionale Studenti as it appears in ANVUR (2014, 297–298).

5 Data source: Anagrafe Nazionale Studenti as it appears in ANVUR (2014, 105).

6 Data source: Anagrafe Nazionale Studenti as it appears in ANVUR (2014, 115).

7 Data source: Ministry of Instruction, Universities and Research Ufficio di Statistica: http://ustat.miur.it/ (accessed 10 August 2017).