The Institutional Barriers to Heterodox Pluralism

This paper applies the feminist concept of epistemological communities to the project of promoting pluralism in the economics discipline. I argue that the economics profession does not resemble a unified and coherent epistemological community and is better viewed as many different yet overlapping and intersecting smaller communities. I argue that this reimaging of the community of economists implies a different conception of pluralism. In an environment where theory is developed at different intersections of epistemological communities, pluralism requires distinguishing between the public process of debate that provides critical evaluation of knowledge claims and the private process of determining what is published and it requires different strategies for evaluating work for publication.