The makings of an authority in science

In Chapter 1, I introduce the ERC and its remarkable development into the most important science funding organization that Europe has witnessed. Entering its second decade of existence, the ERC’s funding is currently regarded as a benchmark of scientific quality, which researchers, departments, universities, and governments across large swaths of the continent regularly use to compare their performance in science. In many respects, however, the ERC has become more than a research funder. By extension, I suggest that the ERC’s development can be approached as the emergence of an outright status intermediary in the field of European science. While previous status literature has enhanced our understanding of the pervasive consequences that authoritative intermediaries generate, we know much less about the processes through which such intermediaries are constructed in the very first place. I thus study the ERC to produce new theory that will augment our knowledge about the construction of authoritative status intermediaries in fields.