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Keep on Movin’? Research Mobility’s Meanings for Italian Early-Stage Researchers

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Abstract

Research mobility is a core notion for the European Research Area (ERA), and a wide body of literature has focused on the factors facilitating and hindering researchers’ mobility. The European discourse tends to promote mobility as a value, but to what extent is it perceived as such by researchers? What role does mobility play in career development, and what kinds of professional practices does it imply? The Italian case is particularly interesting for discussing scientific mobility, since unattractive career prospects and substandard working conditions are pushing more and more researchers to find job opportunities abroad. The article is based on a number of in-depth interviews conducted with early-stage researchers in the field of social sciences and humanities in the context of the research project OMERA Social Sciences, and aims at giving ‘flesh and blood’ to the notion of mobility, thus overcoming the stylized narrative of the mobile scholar.

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Notes

  1. Yet, the concept of brain circulation, introduced in the 1990s, has challenged this linear understanding supporting a broader approach that conceptualizes migration in terms of on-going processes.

  2. In Ackers’ (2008) argument academic mobility is ‘forced’ because it is motivated by the lack of jobs or the inability to access better positions, rather than by a personal choice (417); her analysis is therefore not concerned with forced academic mobility because of state repression, persecution or political instability. This topic is largely unexplored in the literature (see also Dervin, 2011).

  3. Even if there is no agreement at the international level about the meaning of ‘highly skilled workers’ the OECD provided a broad definition of Human Resources in Science and Technology: individuals who completed education at least at the third level in a Science and Technology’s field of study or who are employed in a Science and Technology’s field where the above qualification are normally required even if they are not formally qualified (OECD, 2012).

  4. Data about the emigration of Italian tertiary level graduates (Beltrame, 2007, 39) are in line with the average for Western Europe (7% for Italians in 2000, 7.3% for Western Europe), higher than the ratio for France (3.9%), but lower, for example, than those showed by Germany and the Netherlands (8.8 and 8.9%, respectively).

  5. See OECD (2012, 328–331) for an international comparison.

  6. France invests 2.26%; Germany 2.82%; the United Kingdom 1.77%; EU-15 2.09%; and EU-27 2% (Eurostat, 2012).

  7. Detailed analyses on the topic can be found, for example, in Moscati-Vaira (2008) or in Capano and Tognon (2008).

  8. The reform is composed by several legislative measures, the main being: Law 6 August 2008, n. 133, Law 30 October 2008, n. 169, and Law 30 December 2010, n. 240.

  9. According the decree 6 July 2012, n. 95, that is, the spending review approved by the Monti Government (November 2011—April 2013), restrictions to recruitment should last until 2016.

  10. Among them, recently, the programme launched in 2009 (with the ministerial decrees 45/2009 and 230/2009) and the Law 30 December 2010 n. 238 (known as controesodo, literally ‘counter exodus’).

  11. According to ISTAT in the second trimester of 2012, unemployment rate for aged 15–29 was 24.5%; the same data for youngsters with a bachelor or higher qualification was 23.7%, http://dati.istat.it/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=DCCV_TAXDISOCCU&Lang=, accessed 12 November 2012.

  12. Among the ‘home university’ — all public universities — there are institutions located in the following cities: Rome, Siena, Bologna, Turin, Milan, Venice, Padova and Naples.

  13. The feasibility of an European pension fund for mobile researchers is indeed under discussion within European institutions, see http://ec.europa.eu/research/era/areas/researchers/researchers_en.htm.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their gratitude to the Italian researchers interviewed and to Marco Allegra, Irene Bono, Sandro Busso and Tiago Santos Pereira for their valuable comments and suggestions on previous versions of this article. The usual disclaimer applies. A draft of this article was presented at the Joint EASST/4S Conference 2012 in Copenhagen, in the panel ‘Conditions for work and knowledge production in the social sciences’. This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia — FCT (with the fellowship number SFRH/BPD/73278/2010, awarded to Chiara Carrozza), by Torino World Affairs Institute (Twai) and by Centro Einaudi (Torino).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centro de Estudos Sociais (CES), Colegio de S. Jeronimo Apartado 3087, University of Coimbra (PT), Coimbra, 3001-401, Portugal

    Chiara Carrozza

  2. OMERA Social Sciences, Twai — Torino World Affairs Institute, Via Ponza 4/e, Torino, 10121, Italy

    Sara Minucci

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  1. Chiara Carrozza
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  2. Sara Minucci
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Appendix

Appendix

Table A1

Table A1 The interviews
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Carrozza, C., Minucci, S. Keep on Movin’? Research Mobility’s Meanings for Italian Early-Stage Researchers. High Educ Policy 27, 489–508 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/hep.2014.23

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