Between Tradition and Transition: The Academic Career in Italy

The chapter focuses on a particular and crucial aspect of the academic profession - the recruitment and career system and how it has changed through time. Special attention is given here to changes affecting the recruitment and career system between the late 1990’s and the first decade of the 2000’s. This period saw the institutional framework governing the recruitment and career system changed several times, significantly altering its conditions and dynamics. This, in turn, has produced a challenging environment for academics and for the logic and the practice governing recruitment and career advancement that characterises the academic profession. It will be showed how the academic community responded to those changes and alterations in the period between 1999 and 2014.