ABSTRACT
Economists receive high social recognition in media, politics and business discourses where they often obtain a status as “star economists” and “financial prophets”. This chapter investigates the social conditions that make the formation of top positions in the economic sciences possible. It analyses the career pathway of economists as centrepiece of an academic dispositif. In academic careers, rankings play a special role relevant only for a small group of academics. A top position in “economics as science” is achieved when academics take a privileged scientific discourse position via publications, presentations and various evaluation reports for journals, funds and other academic institutions. To understand the formation of privileged academic discourse positions, we need to investigate the entire construction processes that start already at the earlier phases of the professional biography.
Based on narrative-biographical interviews with economists in the United Kingdom and Germany, this chapter will focus on four sorts of resources that are analysed as “biographical discourse capital”. In a second step, the chapter analyses narrative-biographical interviews with economists from political institutions and think tanks. Here, the results differ significantly from the interviews with academic economists. Rankings disappear from these professional contexts and other relevant (e)valuation tools become important. These evaluation tools are socio-discursively provided by “economic expert networks” embedded within “epistemic supply chains” at the intersection of scientific expert institutions and political organisations. Thus, the “economic expert dispositif” appears as a much more complex social world than “economics as science”.
