This paper discusses the mutual positioning of economics on the one hand, and some interactionist perspectives in applied linguistics on the other hand, by comparing and contrasting their respective approaches to the study of multilingualism on the workplace. After providing an overview of language economics and its application to language at work, the paper proposes a critical assessment of usefulness of the interactionist paradigm to analyses articulated in terms of formal models made up of variables and relationships between these variables. The guardedly optimistic conclusion is that despite deep-seated epistemological differences, interactionism can prove heuristically helpful for research in language economics-once it is recognized that the issues that these distinct approaches seek to investigate are distinct, even if they both study language at work.