Europe's New Scientific Elite: Social Mechanisms of Science in the European Research Area.

The inquiry pursued the question whether the process of European integration in research funding has led to new forms of oligarchization and elite formation in the European Research Area. Empirically, we provided a case study on the European Research Council (ERC), which for the first time represents a case of institution-building in research funding at supranational level. The fact that the ERC intervenes into public science systems so far mostly organised at national level, thus simultaneously transforming traditional structures in the social organization of research, has motivated our hypothesis of an oligarchization process reproducing a new scientific elite in Europe. In scrutinising that presupposition we sought to identify those social mechanisms that generate, reproduce and possibly modify existing dynamics of stratification and oligarchization as an outcome of European integration in the area of science.