Evaluation as ceremony in the Italian university system

After a brief historical account of how evaluation policy and infrastructure developed in Italy, the chapter deals with how the evaluation of universities’ performance works, in particular regarding research and teaching and their links with funding. This discussion highlights the largely ceremonial nature of evaluation practices in that country. while evaluation infrastructure and activities are instituted and operate at the formal level, at the operational one they have almost no real consequences, creating a structural decoupling between the two levels. Evaluation practice and activities are thus reduced to the status of ritual and ceremony, that is a formalistic accomplishment of formal rules with few concrete effects on the evaluated objects