How Universities institutionalize ‘good’ managerial practices? Some evidence from the Italian cultural sector

The paper examines the role of Universities in the ‘managerialization’ process of the Italian artistic-cultural heritage. Universities are, in a very broad sense, institutions whose mission is to promote and support the dissemination of knowledge and the development of new skills in the society. They do so essentially through the research and teaching activities. At the same time, Universities, together with other institutional actors, “select” the knowledge to be transferred to the Students, via their undergraduate curricula and programs, and the practices to be applied to the workplace, via professional masters and similar educational schemes. Based on the evidence of the proliferation of professional courses aiming at spreading the managerial culture into the Italian cultural sector, we adopt the new-institutionalism perspective to draw a quali-quantitative analysis of the offer of managerial masters (both first and second level) from Italian Universities. The main aim of the research is to observe if and how the dissemination of selected “good” managerial practices is attributable to isomorphic processes based on the pursuit of legitimacy and consensus in a certain institutional context. In order to observe the presence of “normative isomorphism” in these processes, we here present a content analysis on the most recurrent profiles of masters activated by Italian Universities that are consistent with the issues of the cultural heritage sector.