The current austerity climate in national and international R&D budgets doesn’t only cut the actual

funding allocated to universities and research institutes but also infuses the evaluations as part of the scientific evaluation procedures with a sense of neoliberal straitened times, intense competition and pitting of evaluators against evaluated. The paper discusses the rating and ranking procedures that form the basis for the funding procedure in any competitive research funding instrument and the question of how and in what ways does the evaluation turn into actual money. These two procedures – scientific evaluation and funding allocation have traditionally been kept apart. The ethnographic case from one recent European country’s science evaluation exercise shows how currently, the “thinking about the scarcity of money”, makes it really difficult in practice to separate these two procedures. While they seem to be separate formally, and made by separate bodies, the evaluation no longer can be thought of as a “money free” sphere, where only words and scientific argumentation work. The two fuse together as the principles and texts of the scientific evaluation begin to be challenged by the financialisation of the outcomes but often with no obvious arena or public space in which this can be freely debated. Methodology used in the paper: Ethnography, critical research, STS inspired case study analysis.

Contribution to STS literature: The paper will address academic capitalism, contested expertise, expert power, consensus formation, usability of science, latest mutations of neoliberalism.

Key words: academic capitalism; science evaluation; universities; expert knowledge.