Metaphors,social practices,and economic life: ASE presidential address

Our lived experiences of the economy shape the metaphors that we use to describe the economy. Yet, any particular metaphor can only provide a partial perspective. There are two ways our conceptual frameworks have reflected partial perspectives. The first is historical: our conceptual frameworks tend to build upon ideas developed during the factory age. A machine metaphor, grounded in the industrial age, focuses on the transformation of resources into outputs, but it obscures other aspects of economic life. Second, economic concepts and metaphors are affected by our personal standpoints and our social identities. As social economists, we recognize that our economy is embedded in society, a society in which social identities such as class, gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality shape our standpoints. To fully understand the continuities and changes in how social provisioning is organized, we need to be attentive to these social identities and how they are constituted and transformed through social practices.