The Emergence Machine

working families · broad

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L19 published noun folk phrase closed compare →

A collective self that makes its boundary wider to every family whose income comes from jobs, so that acting for them reads as acting for most members.

Working families (noun) means: A collective self that makes its boundary wider to every family whose income comes from jobs, so that acting for them reads as acting for most members. It emerges from collective self, boundary, in-group, jobs: A condition most members share is used as the edge of the in-group, so the boundary drawn is wide and a policy aimed inside it reads as aimed at nearly everyone. In the EmergenceLexicon it sits at computed level 19, chaining down to the four foundations (space, time, energy, pattern).

working-families.broad · forms: hard working families, hardworking families, working families, working family

ordinarily means: households that live on earnings from work, addressed as the main body of the public

Examples

Emergence

from: collective self boundary in-group jobs income make wide family come act read member
through: A condition most members share is used as the edge of the in-group, so the boundary drawn is wide and a policy aimed inside it reads as aimed at nearly everyone.

Chain to foundations

full chain as text (433 steps)

Neighborhood

Concepts that depend on this one above; what it is built from below.

built from — 4 more not shownworking familiesL19working-families.broad — A collective self that makes its boundary wider to every family whose income comes from jobs, so that acting for them recollective selfL15collective-self.shared — A self model kept across many members, whose subject is the group they are members of, so the group reads itself as one boundaryL2boundary.limit — The place where a thing ends and what is not the thing begins.in-groupL16in-group.inside — The members a collective self reads as inside its boundary.jobsL18jobs.employment — regular role where people do work for payincomeL17income.financial — money that is received from workmakeL4make.verb — Parts come together through interaction into a structure and persist in that pattern.wideL4wide.spatial — has more space extent than usualfamilyL7family.social — A set of people who stay in a home and like each other.

Relations

contrasts-withmiddle-class.centrethe middle class draws the edge by a range of wealth; working families by where income comes from
contrasts-withordinary-people.coreordinary people splits off those with power; working families widens without naming an out-group

Provenance

author: claude-opus-5-5:hand-curated · date: 2026-09-29 · confidence: 0.85 · source: schema/power-agency-phase.md