The political power of the Italian rectors: An analysis of recruitments in the period 2001-2021

Universities belong to a wider and increasingly important category of knowledge-based professional organizations (Hinings & Leblebici, 2003) such as hospitals or professional service firms, operating as public or private organizations within highly regulated orders. Notwithstanding, organizational literature has rarely been employed to understand variations in intra-organizational mechanisms of resource allocation, especially in the university context. We show that, even in an increasingly hierarchical- bureaucratic organizations like Italian state universities, a combination of different organizational models is likely to be at work at the same time. Hence, individual actors -in this case rectors- can influence resource allocation by exerting a political power, which is typical of a traditional political model even when public policies push for hierarchization. Specifically, our significant empirical endeavor, which Lepori et al. claimed for, allows to quantify to what extent the rectors’ political power favour their own disciplinary area, after having controlled for the intrinsic quality of the SSD and its growth thanks to the empirical strategy based on fixed-effects. High-quality SSDs can thus be characterised by a greater amount of resource. Nonetheless, not all rectors are the same and there exist a certain amount of heterogeneity which can be due to both individual and institutional characteristics. An interesting way for exploring specific variability within the Italian institutional context may range from including rectors’ previous career and education background, to considering organizational dimensions like university reputation and ownership, by extending the analysis to non-state universities. In addition, considering European countries other than Italy where the institutional pressure to centralization is lower would give the opportunity to understand the conditions for stability of control regimes, as a venue for future research. Nonetheless, we must consider that there are multiple concerns for cross-country comparability and objective difficulties in replicating the unique data collection in this paper.