ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on scholarship from several different fields to construct an account of the role of writing in the social formation of economy. The account explores three facets of this topic: We begin by considering the part that writing has played throughout recorded history in the development of objects, practices, and institutions that have enabled and organized human economic activity. Next, we turn to the modern academic/professional discipline of economics, tracing its discursive origins and subsequent evolution through a series of landmark theoretical texts, and then examining the discourse of the discipline from a rhetorical and social constructionist perspective. And finally, we look at how the science of economics produced through this disciplinary discourse has over the last two centuries become an essential conceptual and analytical resource for government policymaking as well as for corporate and individual action.
