The consequences of European Research Council allocations

In Chapter 5, I focus on the consequences of ERC StG funding allocations. Employing documents and observations, I explore how StG allocations during the ERC’s first budget period were perceived to affect the careers of recipients, the activities within departments, and the interactions between universities in the Swedish research context. As a point of comparison, I also explore the perceived consequences of a near-identical funding scheme for Sweden-based ERC StG runner-ups. Beyond providing generous research resources, I show how StG allocations generated status boosts and material benefits among funding recipients; status halos and priority collisions among departments that hosted these recipients; and monitoring behaviors and status aspirations among universities that sought to foster and/or recruit further recipients. None of these extended consequences were perceived to be associated with runner-up funding allocations. In fact, these allocations were merely perceived to constitute generous research resources.