After living for three years in Bedford, England, when I was 15 years old my family made the life altering decision to move to Corona, California. At the time, this was more than a move from one country to another. It felt like a leap between separate solar systems.
Arriving in sunny Southern California, for months on end I didn’t understand a lot of what people were saying and doing. Teenagers the world over share a lot in common: growth spurts, hormonal changes, and a whole lot of awkward and angsty vibes. Yet across these two contexts expressions of glee went from, for instance, “sounds solid” or “that’s wicked, mate,” to “I’m stoked” or “right on.” And we were still speaking the same language! (From this experience, I’ve long had all the empathy in the world for anyone who crosses boundaries and must traverse an entirely different language).
We went from getting in the car and going on the “motorway” to taking a trip on the “freeway”—and don’t even get me started on how directions in Southern California are given, brilliantly lampooned by SNL here. One difference always stood out the most, though: skateboarding. In my UK school, skateboarding was about the least valued activity you could do, but in my new US school you’d constantly hear, “let’s hit up the skate park after school, bro!” For a long time, I walked around labeling all this and more as weird.
Then, one day, it all started making sense. The words, feelings, and actions all around me started to seem normal and natural. In conversations, oh good grief, I even found myself starting to say the word “dude.” Fast forward to decades later when I took this quiz that claims it can determine where you’re from. My jaw dropped when I received my result: Corona, California.
For much of human history, many people didn’t confront a lot of difference in their lives. If you lived with a group in one village for most of your time on earth, you’d assume everything that group told you, and that all the ways of thinking, being, and acting on offer were “just the way things are.” The pressures of geography, tribe, and most of all, repeated words and sentences, would exert enormous force upon how you view the world and what you do in it.
Fast forward to our era, where most of us routinely confront different “social worlds” all the time. Have you ever felt disoriented or exhausted from navigating multiple social groups in a single day? Such experiences present both a challenge and an opportunity for figuring out how to lead well across differences.
There’s a surprising and important way for doing so that counters a lot of common thought. It isn’t categorically reducible to working with specific people, cultures, or contexts only. Let’s call it both a perspective and a skill for “working across worlds of worth.”
What’s Worthy, Dude?
One of the most invisible, unspoken agreements people make in any social situation involves what’s of value or “worth.” We don’t give this much thought, but there’s a powerful canopy we place over ourselves in social groups that makes a material impact on every thought and behavior. Although nobody may talk about it, the power and pressure of what’s “worthy” is always there when we’re in a group.
I’ve seen this among groups of practitioners calling academics “too ivory tower,” implying what’s of “worth” is on-the-ground practice. I’ve seen it among consultants who value quantitative measurement and technical efficiency above qualitative endeavors and spiritual contributions. I’ve seen it among proponents of homeschooling who always see the household as the worthiest place for growth, far above and beyond public organizations or spaces. I’ve been in groups of comedians where constantly doing surface-level, humorous bits is of the most “worth”—and oppositely, being earnest or sharing deeply about oneself is of the least worth. This is before we get to friends or family members, one for whom being “noble” and “sticking to one’s beliefs” is everything, and another whom you couldn’t pry a solid belief out of with a cash offer.
There’s nothing wrong with an individual or group weighting particular ideas or practices. Since what’s of “worth” involves power, tradeoffs, and a powerful belief that what each group creates is normal, natural, and starts to carry pressure that “this is all that matters,” however, knowing more about how our group valuations work carries enormous consequences for our moral, social, and political lives. If, a la Burke, we human beings are ever so driven by the negative (what we’re not) and “goaded by hierarchy,” continual evaluations of “worth” would seem to be a driving force behind a lot of what happens on this planet. At the same time, understanding the worlds of worth we all create and enforce opens a vista for improving leadership and community building, both locally and globally.
Economies of Worth
Let me introduce you to Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s On Justification: Economies of Worth. I’ve never met anyone outside of academia, and few within it, who know about it. Yet its insights run far and wide. As sociologists, Boltanski and Thévenot get to the heart of how people create and justify their group “logics.” There are many ways “worth” gets created, such as through what counts as evidence, and what verbal or nonverbal behaviors are deemed appropriate in a situation.
Sure, we know there are vastly different maps for cross-cultural behaviors. But an “economy of worth” goes far deeper, looking to the ways that “culture” doesn’t necessarily capture all the ways that individual, group, and institutional justifications for what’s valued can mesh and be weighted differently by people.
When you enter a court of law, just think of how differently “evidence” and “consequences” are viewed than when you’re at home. As much as one of my kids would like a judge to send his brother to jail for a day for taking one of his toys, we can be thankful a grown-up finding it under a pillow and sitting down with said child for a teachable moment count more. At a larger level, the ways that different people approached the COVID-19 vaccines highlight how attributions of “worth” don’t necessarily follow, for instance, demographic segmentations. This is where these valuations start to get really interesting.
Six Worlds of Worth
Our lives are filled with different forms of invisible worth from at least six different “worlds”: “inspired,” “domestic,” “civic,” “market,” “industrial,” and “fame” (Boltanski & Thévenot, 83-123). Other types of emergent worlds have been added, but for our purposes, let’s stick to these six just to get the basics down. People don’t just draw from these worlds, they perform them in their interactions with others. What counts as “worthy” forms of authority, emotions, reasoning, and more play out differently in each.
Six Different Worlds of Worth, Created with Canva AI
In the “domestic world,” people most value hierarchy or tradition, while collective goodwill and rights are most valued in the “civic world.” “Market worlds” place value upon personal interest, providing products and advantages, and the expansion of one’s possessions.
Even in the same social spaces, these logics can clash when communicators justify their own or others’ actions by drawing from different worlds of worth. For example, the domestic and civic worlds place an opposite value on the worth of isolation. This goes beyond heady “values” clashes when there’s disagreements, accounting instead for the hold that bodies, objects, environments, and more have when different worlds and their forms of worth mix.
Boltanski and Thévenot explain how, “Something that belongs to and exists in one common world may be unknown in a different world. The world of inspiration, for example, is inhabited by demons and monsters, while the domestic world includes household pets, which [can] go unrecognized in the civic world along with children and old people, and so on. . . . Objects that constitute tools for making the worth of persons manifest in one world may not be taken into account at all in a different world” (131). In each world, people are qualified “by their state of worth,” and arrangements or objects “help objectify the worth of the persons involved. . . . whether they are rules, diplomas, codes, tools, buildings, machines, or take some other form” (142). (For another take on all this, head here).
Accordingly, human beings spend a lot of their days administering tests of worth and seeing where deficiencies with one another lie; “like scientists, ordinary people never stop suspecting, wondering, and submitting the world to tests” (37). In the inspired world, for example, “tests of grace” go on continually, such as “invit[ing] people to read the hand of God in the shape of a stone.” Such tests help us reduce uncertainty and find agreement (136, 360).
You can show you’re in a state of “inspired” worth through expressions of spontaneity and doing creative work (such as poetry, art, music, etc.). The value of dreams, intuition as a form of evidence, not living for money or status, and adventurous living all become highly valued. Oppositely, following a set or linear path for a career, knowledge from formal education, or being down-to-earth may not mean much in this world (13, 159-163).
World Collisions and Creations
Many of the problems of healthcare in the U.S. stem from the clashing logics of the domestic and market worlds. Take, for example, the Mayo clinic, where the family-like atmosphere and values placed on benevolence and care don’t always work well with the financial imperatives also at play. Similarly, those channeling the domestic world will see those channeling the inspired world as unstable. On the other hand, those drawing from the inspired world tend to critique the emphases upon personal bonds, stability, and formality from the domestic realm.
Those channeling the inspired world’s creative impulses will clash with the industrial world’s placement of worth on routinization. The world of fame is its own beast, where authenticity and self-love counter the humility that’s valued in other worlds. Many clashes in modern politics stem from viewing the civic world as too institutional and heartless, while the market world’s reduction of all forms of value to the monetary comes to a head, for instance, in efforts to counter the commercialization of creativity (Boltanski & Thévenot, 154, 237-240). This is all bears similarities to “competing values leadership,” but with a far broader social and material overlay.
We must also create common spaces to live in this world together. Compromises between the worlds are possible, since each world “bears traces of the possibility of other worlds” (135). Life is not just all pluralism and difference, nor fixed spheres of influence, with one of communication’s very functions being to create spaces between us for adapting to, blending, or even creating new worlds with others.
The invention of “fire-side chats” crossed the domestic and fame-driven worlds. Mega-churches offer the spiritual (inspired) with a lot of salable products (market). Companies that try to create a family-like environment blend the market with domestic spaces (Google blends aspects from the inspired, market, and domestic worlds), while factories with gardens channel the industrial and domestic. Protestors draw from forms of worth found in both the inspired and civic worlds. Similarly, civil rights campaigns in the U.S. “allow[ed] clashes previously treated as stemming from people’s private lives to be brought into the public sphere.” (278, 310).
Importantly, different forms of worth are “potentially accessible to all” (139). These are more than language games, roles played, metaphors we live in and through, or any types of highly homogenized, structured form of social capital. You can be in the same physical room or even the same Zoom space where multiple forms of worth get practiced. Communicators try to coordinate actions and cohere meanings amid mystery by justifying what’s worthy and what’s not in social situations. Worlds of worth thus come being, are maintained by, and push and pull against these logics in live interactions.
Justifying Worlds of Worth
What’s the takeaway, then? (That’s it’s own form of “worth,” by the way—not all people in all places and at all times place value on having an immediate application for every insight—this is usually news and sometimes quite distressing to most of the New Yorkers I work with). It’s to work well with different forms of worth and the tests that they’ll inevitably bring.
In sum, the skill with which we can understand, enter into, and exit social worlds, with their different forms of worth, is a critical practice for leadership and cosmopolitan communication in the 21st century. It exemplifies the constraints that we face in social situations, that we have a choice about the types of stories we tell, and a role to play in adapting well to the types of complexity that can mesh within a single space.
Here’s a further implication in all of this. As Boltanski and Thévenot write, “the most inspired artist cannot let the inspiration of the moment determine [their] course of action in every situation; in order to not be perceived as mentally ill, [they have] to stand in line at the post office like any other customer” (216). Looking around, “it is precisely the plurality of the mechanisms deriving from the various worlds that accounts for the tensions that pervade . . . organizations” (18).
If someone thinks that they don’t need to justify or explain where they’re coming from or what is happening in a situation, communication becomes unnecessary and actions such as “violence” may even become reasonable. Similarly, reducing all perceptions and values to one world of worth—forgoing talk and necessary confrontations with difference—can lead to the same end (37-38, 134).
In Pepper’s terms, different than complete skepticism or dogmatism (“utter skepticism is essentially a dogmatist who doubts all things, always,” while the latter is “one whose belief exceeds [their] cognitive grounds for belief”), worlds of worth provide support for the practical value of “relative skepticism,” a stance that holds beliefs tentatively while always remaining open to further correction, critique, world crossings, and spaces in which the communion of communication can be advanced.
Worlds of worth provide a good reminder that almost “all problems can be stated as problems of communication” (McKeon, via Craig), and that a type of “transcendent eloquence” (Pearce & Littlejohn) is most needed to address such predicaments. In essence, asking the question of “what’s worthy here” confronts each of us with both a challenge and an opportunity to engage with “The Arts of Living in Different Worlds” (148).