Discipline and (Academic) Tribe: Humanities and the Social Sciences in Italy

Abstract

In Italy, the social sciences and humanities (SSH) have been constrained by a strong state regulation of academic recruitment and disciplinary contents and boundaries and a deep interpenetration between the academic field and political life. Governmental changes combined with pressures from different stakeholders led to a disordered proliferation of rules that were both constraining and manipulable. This institutional environment sets the stage for academic groups and resourceful academic men to act in order to strengthen their disciplines, expanding them while enforcing barriers and boundaries against other academic ‘tribes’ and emerging disciplines. Quantitative and qualitative indicators (students; faculties; journals; professional associations) highlight how the interplay among field constraints, normative structures and collective actions shaped the post-1945 institutionalization of the seven disciplines under study.

Appendices

Appendix 5.1. An Historical-Institutional Profile of the Italian University

The first constitutive act of university politics in Unified Italy was the 1859 Casati law (n. 3725). The main disposition—which worked, substantially, until the University reform in 1969—was to set the number of universities, faculties and chairs in legislation.¹⁴ It also established a three-level ranking of universities: leading; secondary; and private. This corresponded implicitly with a ranking of faculties. First came the faculty of law, followed by faculties of letters and philosophy, medicine and natural sciences, with the various High schools for applied sciences at the bottom. Finally, it limited access to the universities to those who had attended the classical gymnasium. The Casati law, then, depicted an elitist university under government control, with an unclear mission; should it prepare graduates for a scientific career or a profession?

A further important step in the organization of academia is represented by the dispositions of the Minister Rava in 1909. They were also effective until the end of the twentieth century. They divided fundamental and complementary teaching and established that chairs could be created only by law.

The Gentile Reform of 1923 ratified a (de)professionalization of the university studies, granting more autonomy in defining the curricula and the number and denomination of teaching to universities, and abolishing the distinction between leading and secondary universities, though it did stress the distinction between universities and the High Schools oriented towards applied sciences. The dispositions during the fascist regime that followed progressively revoked the teaching autonomy conferred to the universities by the Gentile Reform. Of particular importance was the 1938 Bottai reform (n. 1652), which not only strictly redefined the curricula, but also correlated them to defined professional careers, effectively outclassing the scientific mission of the university.

After the Second World War and the fall of fascism, one of the few dispositions concerning higher education issued by the new ‘democratic’ government (law n. 312/1953) allowed universities to expand complementary teaching within the various existing degree courses. Interest in the university system arose once again in 1962 with the constitution of a parliamentary commission to examine the condition of public instruction. The commission highlighted two questions, which culminated in the 1969 reform (law n. 910): the possibility to access to all degree courses independently of the sending school; and the possibility for each student to arrange his/her curricula differently from the curricula set by law. As a consequence, the existing separation between main teaching and complementary teachings lost importance.

The increase of students and teaching, but not chairs, in the 1970s instigated a reform of the university staff. Decree 382 in 1980 subdivided the academic structure into three levels: full professors; associate professors; and tenured researchers. Further, it instituted the ‘departments,’ substitutes for the pre-existing ‘Institutes,’ and ratified that each University could establish ‘Graduate schools’ based on proposals of the faculties or of the departments (Capogrosso Colognesi and Cerulli 1981). From the end of the 1980s to 1999, a set of decrees and laws gradually gave greater autonomy to universities. In 1990, the law n. 341 ratified a new system of disciplinary classification for professors (by scientific disciplinary sectors, SSD). The application of SSD was not immediate and, at the end of the 1990s, it was extended to include tenured researchers, Ph.D. candidates and post-doctoral research fellows. In 1997, the law n. 127 conferred upon the university the power to institute degree courses. Finally, the ministerial decree of 1999 (n. 509) replaced the existing ‘corso di laurea’ with three years of Bachelor’s degree courses and two of Master’s degree courses (the so called ‘3+2’ system) that was redefined in 2004 (law n. 270). It also introduced a new classification system—the ‘classes’—to classify the various degree courses that proliferated after the universities became autonomous (Gasparri 2005). The last University reform in 2010 (law n. 240) caused three main changes within the academic system, although it was only partially enacted because of the lack of funds. It introduced two new positions for temporary researchers, the national habilitation, and several and juxtaposed evaluation systems to evaluate the research activities of the permanent staff, Universities and departments that constituted new criteria for the distribution of public funding (Brollo and De Luca Tamajo 2011).

Appendix 5.2. Sociology as an Example of SSD

Where is sociology in the Italian SSD system? There are three issues to consider. The first concerns the curious classification criteria adopted by the Italian institutional system to cluster disciplines in ‘disciplinary macro-area’, numbered from 1 to 14. The first areas regard ‘pure natural science disciplines (mathematics, physics) whereas sociological SSD are included in the last Area, the so-called ‘Scienze politiche e sociali’ (Political and social sciences), suggesting a hierarchy of relevance among natural, human and social sciences. The second issue concerns sociology itself as divided in six SSD: General sociology; Sociology of culture and communication; Economic sociology; Urban and environmental sociology; Political sociology; and Sociology of Law. Thus, within Area 14, sociological sectors are grouped with non-sociological disciplines, such as political philosophy, political science and the History of Africa, among others. The inclusion in an Area suggests the pertinent disciplines have both meaningful affinities and similar intellectual distances to others. In this regard, General sociology seems closer to History of Africa than to Anthropology, the latter being included in the humanistic Research Area 11 (an area comprising various historical and philosophical disciplines).

The third issue concerns how the sociological SSD have been constructed by clustering the sociological ‘subdisciplines’ that existed before the introduction of the SSD system (in 1994 there were 65 subdisciplines). It is not surprising that the decision to classify a subdiscipline in a SSD, rather than in another area, is the result of internal [institutional?] struggles among sociologists, alongside those between sociologists and scholars of other disciplines (i.e. for Sociology of law, between sociologists and jurists).¹⁵ However, the main point is that these ‘struggles’ led the symbolic spaces and boundaries of SSD being fixed in official declaratory judgments (declaratorie). The declaratorie are relevant for identifying supposedly ‘objectified’ criteria to be used in competitive examinations (i.e. for academic positions or for the habilitation), or in order to establish if the scientific products (and activities) of a ‘sociologist’ are pertinent, or not, to the SSD as he competes for acceptance or for upgrading (see for example the list of topics included in SPS/07 ‘Sociologia Generale’). These declaratorie were last updated in 2001. It follows that potential new sociological areas developed at both national and international levels in the last 15 years are formally excluded from the official definition of the discipline, which itself is not really consistent with the interior articulation. In the end, we can compare this classification system based on Research Areas and SSD to the famous classification imagined by Jorge Luis Borges as pertaining to ‘a certain Chinese encyclopedia: 1. those that belong to the Emperor, 2. embalmed ones, 3. those that are trained, 4. suckling pigs, 5. mermaids, 6. fabulous ones, 7. stray dogs, 8. those included in the present classification, 9. those that tremble as if they were mad, 10. innumerable ones, 11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, 12. others, 13. those that have just broken a flower vase, 14. those that from a long way off look like flies’. The tragedy is that this arbitrary, and logically inconsistent, classificatory system is institutionally effective and impacts on the reproduction and transformation of the symbolic and social boundaries of sociology as practiced in Italy.

Area 14

• 1. SPS/01 Filosofia politica.

• 2. SPS/02 Storia Delle Dottrine Politiche.

• 3. SPS/03 Storia Delle Istituzioni Politiche.

• 4. SPS/04 Scienza Politica.

• 5. SPS/05 Storia E Istituzioni Delle Americhe.

• 6. SPS/06 Storia Delle Relazioni Internazionali.

• 7. SPS/07 Sociologia Generale.

  • Metodologia Delle Scienze Sociali (Q05a)

  • Metodologia E Tecnica Della Ricerca Sociale

  • Politica Sociale

  • Principi E Fondamenti Del Servizio Sociale

  • Sistemi Sociali Comparati

  • Sociologia

  • Sociologia Dei Gruppi

  • Sociologia Della Salute

  • Sociologia Della Scienza

  • Sociologia Della Sicurezza Sociale

  • Sociologia Dello Sviluppo

  • Storia Del Pensiero Sociologico

  • Teoria E Metodi Della Pianificazione Sociale

• 8. SPS/08 Sociologia Dei Processi Culturali E Comunicativi.

• 9. SPS/09 Sociologia Dei Processi Economici E Del Lavoro.

• 10. SPS/10 Sociologia Dell’Ambiente E Del Territorio.

• 11. SPS/11 Sociologia Dei Fenomeni Politici.

• 12. SPS/12 Sociologia Giuridica, Della Devianza E Mutamento Sociale.

• 13. SPS/13 Storia E Istituzioni Dell’Africa.

• 14. SPS/14 Storia E Istituzioni Dell’Asia.