Higher education policy in practice: Digitalization and the governance reform in an Italian university (1988-2021)

Academic research has extensively inspected the changing modes of governance in higher education systems through systemic and comparative research. This article aims to investigate these processes from a different perspective and vantage point. In particular, the translation of (trans)national instances into local micro-policy and practice is examined by historicising the social construction of digitalisation as a policy field in an Italian university over three decades (1988–2021). The emergence of knowledge and power arrangements across the complex entanglement of broader cultural history and local microhistory is thus examined. A hybrid configuration emerges in the observed university that features aspects from both its legacy bureaucratic mode of governance and the entrepreneurial paradigm. These institutional dynamics are consistent with wider systemic patterns in Italian higher education. The divergence between planned policy change and experienced realities is thus confirmed.