Over the last few decades, Linguistics has made a number of contributions to the understanding of academic-scientific discourse, in particular of the linguistic-rhetorical features of core genres in scientific communication. Among those genres, the scientific article has received greater attention because of its centrality in the research process. However, the literature has often approached each discipline discourse homogenously, without taking into account the branches or perspectives within each field of knowledge. In the light of a tradition of studies of languages for specific purposes, this paper aims at contributing to our knowledge of intra-disciplinary variation. Based on the assumption that there is a relationship of mutual determination between text and context, we have built a corpus of abstracts from two journals which are representative of opposite approaches within the field of Economics, in order to show they have an impact on the rhetorical structure. The results show some differences between the rhetorical configurations in each subcorpus: in one case, 'stating the purpose' > 'describing the methodology used'; whereas in the other, 'contextualizing' > 'stating the purpose'. Thus, it becomes evident that there is an impact of the authors' (as well as the journals') epistemological -and ideological-positioning on the rhetorical configuration of the gender. These findings contribute to the advancement of knowledge of disciplinary languages, and they are thus relevant to the design of teaching proposals that address reflection on the tensions inherent to the disciplinary field as well as on the rhetorical-linguistic forms which are useful to the construction of self-positioning.