ABSTRACT
This chapter is a collaboration between a feminist economist and a feminist linguist. 1 We work together because as feminists we are interested in the relationship between the rhetoric and practices of economics — not only for the scientific pleasure of investigating how language and social institutions reflect and shape one another, but also, and more fundamentally, because we are interested in the transformation of the practices of academic disciplines through analytic critique of the relationship among language, scientific practice and power. In this chapter, addressed to the community of linguists interested in language and gender issues, we will look at the relationship among stories which are told in economics, the language in which they are told, the communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991, Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992) which they reflect and the communities of practitioners which they shape.
