Governing the Costs and Financial Sustainability Standardization of Italian Universities

This article investigates the growing role of cost standards and financial sustainability procedures in the governance of public universities, focusing on the Italian higher education sector. Although the neoliberal transformation of universities and the spread of performance-based management have been widely studied, limited research has explored how States themselves implement cost standardization as a mechanism of control. Adopting a Foucauldian theoretical framework and drawing on primary data from interviews and institutional documents, the study first traces the evolution of these reforms over the past two decades and then examines how university actors experience and interpret their impact conceptualizing standard costing and sustainability metrics as technologies of government—instrumental in aligning institutional behavior with macro-level policy objectives. These technologies are produced by multiple centers of calculation and rely on calculative practices that link funding distribution to performance classifications. The findings reveal how these practices contribute to a disciplinary regime that reshapes accountability structures and power relations within universities. By situating the Italian case within broader debates on neoliberalism, standardization, and public sector accounting, the study extends Foucauldian scholarship on governmentality and contributes to understanding how financial reforms manifest in higher education governance.