Les mandarins et la horde bibliométrique

The article presents the last decades’ equilibria, oppositions and conflicts that have contributed to the institutional reorganisation of Italian sociology, as well as to the evolution of its recruitment, evaluation, and promotion procedures. These changes are ongoing, and their supporters and opponents continue to confront each other. Therefore, the article is also a bit of a history of a still-raging battle. In the first section, we explain how three main coalitions have historically controlled Italian sociology: powerful academic cliques (associated initially with the three main political parties of the country), which until recently shared among themselves all academic positions and positions of power within the discipline. In the second section, we show how this system has subsequently been challenged by a shortage of jobs and, above all, by two successive reforms of university recruitment, which introduced a procedure of national qualification (abilitazione) for professorships and a standardized measure of individual productivity. Indeed, as detailed in the third section, the past two decades in Italy have seen the rise of bibliometrics and the gradual legitimization of new criteria to measure scientific quality, which is now defined more in terms of peer-reviewed articles and internationalization. Finally, a fourth section shows how these changes have also taken place in a general context in which the employment conditions of sociology doctors and graduates were worsening.