The Idea of Merit and the Culture of Excellence in Italian Academia. New Logic and Old Inequalities

The neoliberal academy promotes a new managerial model based on the centrality of academic performance, conceived within the normative framework of meritocracy as the result of individual effort. The paper aims to investigate how merit and excellence are constructed, intertwined, and interpreted by Italian academics, and to understand the implications of the new logic in terms of (re) production of inequalities at individual and organizational levels. We conducted a content analysis on 176 semi-structured interviews with early and advanced-career scholars in the STEM and SSH Departments, members of selection boards, Departments’ Directors and their deputies in four Italian Universities. Findings show how the rhetoric of measurable excellence represents, for many academics, the way to reward merit and, therefore, the guarantee of impartiality and the necessary step for leaving the old academic logic based on affiliation and loyalty. However, the assumption that the new meritocratic system, opposed to the old cooptative one, is always capable of rewarding scholars for their individual value risks naturalizing and individualizing the opportunities’ structure. Moreover, the margins of discretion seem to be still wide and open the door to biased evaluations and decisions guided by other organizational logics, that are obscured by the centrality of meritocratic rhetoric.