Values Studies: History and Concepts

Among the personal and social pursuits of humans, clarifying one's identity (Who am I?) and one's own or group's values (What is important to me individually? To us collectively?) have been among the central themes of intellectual, social, and communicative development. The questions of right action, civic morality, and meaningful relational standards certainly figured prominently in the recorded writings of the early philosophers. Values played a central role in the classical thought and rhetoric of many traditions, whether that of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, or Augustine around the Mediterranean; Confucius, Mencius, or Lao Tzu in China; the Brahman Vedas, the Upanishads, Lord Mahavira and the Jains, or Siddhartha Buddha in the Indian peninsula; or Zoroaster in Persia. Clarifying human behavior by elucidating the value of certain preferred character or moral traits is a common theme interwoven in the history of human development, a dialogue later continued by political and religious figures from Moses to Jesus to Muhammad to Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr.

Values are not only espoused by great teachers, but also have often been one of the early starting points for the study of humans and society in many fields. Nearly every branch of the humanities or social science has produced seminal articles [Page 985]discussing the concept of value or approaches to values study as it is applied in that area of research, from economics to environmental science, sociology to semantics, metaphysics to management, cognition to communication. What others believe and hold as important is considered to be a primary influence on their personal behavior and social functioning.

At the same time, each set of social mores-values develop in a specific geographic, economic, historical, political, ethnic and/or religious context, and those local conditions lead localized groupings of people to affirm degrees of divergent values. Though one might ask, “Who am I?” in sorting out one's place within one's respective social schema, questions of “What do I or we find most important?” often only arise when the citizens of one social group are confronted with the striking differences of another social unit. Paraphrasing Blaise Pascal in his Pensees—what truth is on one side of the Pyrenees is error on the other side. Early contact with others is often first mitigated by noting perceived areas of distinct otherness and assigning these to the realm of enduring stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination—judgments based often on value differentiations.