Sociologists born in the late 1930s came of age as a "disobedient generation": They contested established ways of doing social science and introduced, for the first time, a massive dosage of Marxism into Italian sociology. Many young sociologists developed a new style of "co-research " based on a radical critique of Italian modernization . At the same time, the emergence of "mass university " helped them find a quick pathway to tenured jobs within the academic system . This weakened their radical stance and led to a rapid process of normalization. In the 1970s, the enlargement of the Italian sociological community gave rise to geographical and subdisciplinary cleavages, with a prevalence of Northern and Roman scholarly clusters and the importation of new sociological trends from outside Italy.