IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/rseval/v23y2014i3p249-260..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Supporting ‘future research leaders’ in Sweden: Institutional isomorphism and inadvertent funding agglomeration

Author

Listed:
  • Olof Hallonsten
  • Olof Hugander

Abstract

The most recent fashion in the policy-level promotion of excellence in academic research seems to be the launching of funding programs directed to young and promising (postdoc level) researchers with the purpose of assisting them in establishing their own research profile at this allegedly crucial and fragile career stage. In the Swedish public research funding system, which is rather diversified and also quite recently has been recast, a number of such programs have been launched in recent years by public and private actors alike, all with the stated ambition of providing funding to those typically in lack of the same. In this article, we discuss the rather striking uniformity of these programs on the basis of the concept of institutional isomorphism from neoinstitutional theory, which is a powerful conceptual tool with capacity to explain why organizations in the same field grow alike in their practices despite preconditions that would suggest otherwise. Analyzing qualitatively the stated purposes of the programs and the discursive shift that accompanies them in policy, and analyzing quantitatively the 130 recipients of funding from the programs, we show that there are agglomeration effects that are unintended but also expectable, given the nature of the funding landscape in Sweden and the institutional isomorphism among the organizations in the field.

Suggested Citation

  • Olof Hallonsten & Olof Hugander, 2014. "Supporting ‘future research leaders’ in Sweden: Institutional isomorphism and inadvertent funding agglomeration," Research Evaluation, Oxford University Press, vol. 23(3), pages 249-260.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:rseval:v:23:y:2014:i:3:p:249-260.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/reseval/rvu009
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Astrid Jaime & Constanza Pérez‐Martelo & Bernardo Herrera & Gonzalo Ordóñez‐Matamoros & Dominique Vinck, 2023. "Functioning strategies of the research groups' leaders in the context of funding and policy instabilities," Review of Policy Research, Policy Studies Organization, vol. 40(2), pages 282-306, March.
    2. Jonas Lindahl & Cristian Colliander & Rickard Danell, 2020. "Early career performance and its correlation with gender and publication output during doctoral education," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 122(1), pages 309-330, January.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:rseval:v:23:y:2014:i:3:p:249-260.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/rev .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.