If this "economist-speak" is shorthand, it is a very strange type. "Unexplained residual" or "caused by other or (God help us) unknown factors" would be consistent with economic terminology and, as H. Kissinger would say, have the added advantage of being true.
Which goes back to your claim of enforced analytical standards.
The ideology of the word 'technology' -- something exogenous, apolitical, amoral, inexorable, and always having the potential for good is obvious.
If I am depressed because my boss wants to fire me, my wife is perpetually regretful she didn't marry someone else, my dog has just died, and my daughter is going out with deadbeats, I could attribute my condition to menopause and uphold the high analytical standards of academic mainstream economists, present company excepted. That would be an elastic definition too.
Cheers,
MBS