Values

The term values is both a center of social and cultural energy, with great significance in the academic and popular arenas, and an inherently ambiguous and contested term. Broadly speaking, “value” is ascribed to particular targets or reference points (such as “the enduring values” of a society), to the activity of valuing something (as in “our company values these things …”), and to increments of assessment (as in “the added value” of a new managerial project). People are conceived, especially by social psychologists such as M. Rokeach and S. Schwartz, as developing preferences for one value over another and then forming intentions and engaging in behaviors that are consistent with their preferred values.

From sociological and anthropological standpoints, values become embedded in a community of shared experience and pursuits, defining that community in terms of worldview and the taken-for-granted, and then setting the stage for individual attitudes and preferences. As Émile Durkheim explained well, the very identity of a community becomes to some degree indistinguishable from its core set of values—values that take on a certain kind of trans-subjective quality over time.

From the standpoint of linguistics, communication, and to some extent philosophy, established or powerfully expressed values become the building blocks of premises on which arguments, decisions, and actions are based. According to Aristotle, values become reliable persuasive resources for any agent operating within a particular community. In management and organizational behavior, values have been closely examined in terms of their roles in work processes and in terms of alignments of orientations, decisions, and other behaviors. All of these senses of values are therefore important in their applications to the context of organizations, work, and society.