The Sociology of Values

Abstract

The history of the concept of values is reviewed from its beginnings in the 19th century to the present. Work on values rose to preeminence under Talcott Parsons and his associates during 1950-1965, Nevertheless, the theory they produced was flawed: It lacked sophisticated empirical support, imposed preordained categories on reality, and was formulated at an unresearchable level of abstraction. Alternative theories of values fared only somewhat better. More vibrant is the long tradition of (nonParsonian) empirical studies in various subject areas (e.g. achievement, religion). This body of work, however, is ad hoc in nature: The data produced are essentially noncomparable and do not advance the concerns of value theory. The recent work of Kohn (on class and values) and Rokeach (on general value systems) has begun to remedy the situation. It is suggested that value analysis of the future can only solve past ditficulties if (a) it develops grounded theory and research methods—i.e, hypotheses and techniques tied, from the outset, to the values of real populations; (b) it undertakes simultaneous multitechnique observations of the same population; and (c) it carefully tests some of the important hypotheses from value theory abandoned since the 1960s