ABSTRACT
Economic science uses a set of concepts, notions and explanatory constructions. Its principles became normative, e.g. the balance of supply and demand, the rationality of the behaviours, the necessary counterparts of money supply. Economic knowledge allows the existence of an economic language. This one is used, or at least heard, by all. It is transformed in social representations of the economy, which we will call economic representations. These last are thus partly the fruit of a diffusion of this language by the set of the tools of the knowledge’s mediation and by the set of speeches where it organizes the behaviours. While being diffused, it undergoes a certain number of transformations related to a double constraint, that of the interpretation of decisions (or behaviours) partially economic, and that of popularization, that is a loss of specificity. This economic language, used in everyday life, does not indicate the same referents: the words do not refer exactly to the same thing, in particular when the ordinary meaning of the term differs from the scientific definition. The working population, for example includes the unemployed because they are looking for a job and do not include the housewives; however, vox populi said that the first are idle and second quite occupied. The economic reasoning of the social representations calls upon causes or consequences that are not economic or reinforces a social argumentation by giving him the attributes of the scientific authority of the economy (Vergès et al. 1995).
