"Understanding University governance: the interplay between efficiency and legitimacy"

Governance issues are of great interest both on depicting a new model of negotiated government within the public sector and on assuring economic wealth in enterprises beyond the recent unexpected corporate failures. Governance is still fundamental when it refers to the interplay among different levels of institutional or organizational powers. During the last years it has been used to legitimize the implementation of new accounting tools and, in such a way, redefining the relationship between administrators, professionals and social community of reference (Villareal, 2001). Indeed, economic pressures and new political debate on welfare sustainability have conducted to a deep rethinking of public institutions and to the need of new accounting tools (Hood, 1991, Alexander, 2000, Cinquini, 2001, Cinquini, Miolo Vitali, 2000). More specifically, if we consider Universities, we assist to the coupling of “good governance” and “efficient management” that has supported the implementation of Bologna Process (starting from 1999) and the revision of Faculty and Department interplays (law 382/1980). It has also conducted to new funding criteria (e.g. law 537/1993, inter-ministerial decree 146/2004) while pushing Universities towards autonomy (e.g. ministerial decree 509/1999, 270/2004) and strategic planning (ministerial decree 25/1998). The last reform on education offer together with economic pressures tend to increase cuts on inefficiencies and definitely conduct to reshaping and rethinking University role and governance. Universities, as institutions, have been shaped during their history obeying to peculiar organizational and functioning principles that are still a part of the internal role of administrative and academic people (Mora, 2001) . However, the recent need of efficiency and economic accountability, has impacted on their organization and search for legitimacy. In particular, University governing bodies can be perceived as stewards to ensure that university participants stay true to the objects of university. Otherwise they can be perceived as the apex of managerial hierarchies, sharing the management of institution and improving decision-making or else they provide means to choose between the interests of different stakeholders. So, the question is: how can we read governance in Universities? And specifically, if we deal with the concept of “University governance” as the mix of two intertwined concepts: “efficiency” and “legitimacy”, which are the real use of managerial tools in allocating resources within Universities and which is the effective role of administrative personnel and academics as part of governing bodies? The work will be organized in sections: the first one will depicts the challenging environment where Universities are required to change, the second one introduces the streamlines of Bologna Process while the third section discusses the theoretical background of governance issues and University structure. The “Methodological framework” (forth section) encompasses the description of Oliver’s framework of analysis, before starting the fifth section about the specific research design: it depicts hypothesis and research questions together with case-study protocol. Another section is devolved to the results description, while a final section discusses the main findings and stresses limitations and contributions of the present work.