Disciplinary homogeneity in university departments following the Gelmini law: an exploratory analysis through social networks

Abstract

The aim of this work is to evaluate the implementation of the Gelmini law; a law that has reorganized the universities into departments in order to create homogeneous scientific centres in the various fields of research. The methodology used to analyse the change in the structure of departments following the new regulation considers the social networks that unify the subject areas according to their current position. With the help of these social networks, we try to understand whether the new departments are really homogeneous research centres or instead are modelled on the previous faculties. The present work has been carried out in relation to the universities of the Abruzzo region and the sectors interconnected with Area 13 on the list of italian university disciplinary sector see Appendix (which contains the fields of economics and statistics), and we can extend the results to other Italian universities. We highlight: (1) the interactions between the scientific discipline sectors and the departments; (2) the definition of a cosector data matrix (binary and weighted ties); and (3) the hierarchical analysis of the cliques of the scientific discipline sectors. We discuss and compare the results to find out the reasons why the universities have still not become homogenous research centres.