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The word value appears in two forms. The first is as a noun meaning core ideals and norms, as in, for example, “independence is a core value in contemporary U.S. society.” The second form of value is a verb meaning the process by which things acquire importance or economic price, which is sometimes understood as valuation, as in, for example, “the ball was valued at $1.29 for quick resale” or “group members value her participation.” Most social theory has focused on values as nouns that represent key ideas for a given culture, perform certain functions for society, or figure in ideological systems of power. However, an additional consideration of valuation can bring into focus issues of value change and the relationships between cultural and economic values.
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) articulated a model of society in which social norms and values arose from the increasing specialization of social roles and labor in the emerging industrial societies of the time. Values and norms of behavior provide the social integration that allows individuals to function in society (Durkheim [1893] 1997), providing cohesiveness, trust, and stability. Durkheim’s model of integration provided the background for Talcott Parsons’s mid-twentieth century theory of society, which emphasized the functionality of values and rules, particularly in maintaining the equilibrium and stability of society (see especially Parsons 1951). Culture and a system of values form one of four dimensions of society, the others being social structure, relation to environment, and achievement of goals. For Parsons, the value system must be integrated into people’s personalities and will then guide appropriate behavior. For example, competitiveness and autonomy, or individualism, are key values that are important for people to adopt to be successful in a capitalist economy, and much effort in schooling and media is spent on inculcating those ideals.
This view of values is easily critiqued for its prioritization of system stability over the possibility of social change, and for reducing the scope of agency for individuals who are seemingly programmed by social institutions to adhere to norms and uphold values. While Durkheim’s work on values clearly contributed to the functionalism of Parsons, Durkheim took a view of crime and criminality (On the Normality of Crime, 1895) that prefigures more critical approaches to values and norms, particularly what has been known as labeling theory (Becker [1963] 1997), and also critical approaches to deviance, such as those of Michel Foucault (1977). Labeling theory argues that acts are not inherently deviant but are labeled deviant by others, particularly powerful groups that articulate normative systems to protect social stability and their interests. For example, civic unrest may be treated by the state as sign of the deviance of protestors. But unrest may nonetheless hold value as a release for social tension and further may indicate that systematic injustice on the part of the state requires response and remediation and that alternative or neglected values should be given consideration.
Values are thus a part of systems of social power, providing the ideological frame that shapes public discourse about how the social world is operating and how it should operate. For example, when individualism as a value is prevalent, explanations for social troubles are often laid upon the shoulders of individuals: Joblessness is taken as a sign of individual lack of effort rather than diminished regional economy; mental illness as weakness or individual pathology rather than as outcome of stress and conflicting social expectations. Values are associated with and defined by those with the greatest social power. For example, in Western contexts rationality and authority are associated with masculinity, while emotionality and dependence are stereotypically associated with femininity. This means that, for example, female professors may have more difficulty in establishing authority in a classroom: If they engage in conduct considered normal for a male professor, they are seen as breaking gender norms and dismissed as cold or shrill, whereas if their behavior adheres to stereo-typically feminine norms of conduct, they are not taken seriously as experts. Other social stereotypes and the values attributed to ascribed characteristics such as race, gender, or attractiveness lead to forms of discrimination both subtle and obvious.
The differential effects of values are thus an issue for formal politics and public policy as well as informal arrangements of social power. While technocracy (rule by experts) has its appeal as a seemingly neutral form of governance, it cannot itself define social priorities and thus still relies upon values to direct the efforts of the state. For example, while scientists may be able to describe the phenomenon known as global warming with mathematical tools with no obvious bias or values, it is still a matter of values to identify the potential social and environmental changes as harmful to human objectives.
Values also intersect with public policy in that negative values used to portray social groups may lead to discrimination and impede more useful ways of addressing problems. For example, groups that value social solidarity and tradition over competitiveness (whether Native American, Amish, or urban African American) come to be seen as having a “culture of poverty” and are blamed for their “backwardness” and lack of economic achievement. Recent research suggests that while values and attitudes are relevant factors, socioeconomic or class background is far more important in shaping potential success in education and work. Specifically, African American families do not possess some pathological set of values that prevents their economic achievement: Income and educational disparities can be attributed to both mechanisms of social reproduction that make it difficult for poor people of any race to achieve intergenerational social mobility and to ongoing processes of racial discrimination that result in lower wages for persons with similar qualifications (Mason 2007).
Because the media continues to circulate social stereotypes and uncritically reflects normative ideologies of value, it has a large role in supporting existing structures of power at the expense of productive social and value change. Whether relying on racial stereotypes or on common narratives of “the self-made man,” television programming reinforces value systems. Media may use representations of deviance to titillate and sell, but this is done with the sense that the actions or characters represented are not normal, and sometimes to make specific points about morality. Most police dramas, whether fictional or “reality”-based, play on this process. Of course, advertisements sell products based on their value, both in the sense of monetary cost and utility, and as representations of larger ideas: Car commercials sell freedom and individualism, household cleaners sell cleanliness and domestic harmony. People in the United States will apparently buy anything that is marketed as “convenient” even if it really is not, or even if it undermines other values such as environmental sustainability or community (Tierney 1993).
As markets continue to globalize, both products and values will travel to new areas. To do this, products need to be legible to consumers. John Evans (1998) argues that processes that simplify and standardize everything, from units of land and property laws, to sizes of clothing and other units of measure, can either be products of state regulation or of capitalist needs for stability and regularity. Values, too, will travel as people learn to want to participate in global economies as producers and consumers. George Ritzer (2004) argues that the need to remove anything controversial and to reduce the identity of consumer products to their “lowest common denominator” to ensure the widest possible sales will strip away all but the most trivial of meanings from commodities and cultural products.
Legibility is a property of things to be read and measured. Its establishment involves a set of processes by which units and systems of notation are formulated and provide metrics for the evaluation of things. These processes also connect issues of law and custom as the economic values of things interact with moral or cultural values. What is the value of a human life and how is it to be measured? Or of a sacred site, or an animal species? Legibility is a form of valuation, which may be tied to economic scales of value established by assessing costs and profits, but also to processes whereby variations in human lifestyles are labeled worthwhile, normal, or deviant. Alternative lifestyles are illegible and perceived as deviant by the mainstream, as unable to be understood or valued, and are not protected by law (Butler 1993). Legibility and economic valuation are ways of establishing and reading value and measure and are closely intertwined, suggesting that production and consumption and social or cultural reproduction and economic reproduction are more closely intertwined than traditional theories of political economy have suggested (Joseph 1998).
Bibliography:
- Becker, Howard Saul. [1963] 1997. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Simon & Schuster.
- Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge.
- Durkheim, Emile. [1893] 1997. The Division of Labor in Society. Trans. W. D. Halls. New York: Free Press.
- Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon.
- Joseph, Miranda. 1998. The Performance of Production and Consumption. Social Text 16 (1): 25–61.
- Mason, Patrick L. 2007. Intergenerational Mobility and Interracial Inequality: The Return to Family Values. Industrial Relations 46 (1): 51–80.
- Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The Social System. New York: Free Press. Ritzer, George. 2004. The Globalization of Nothing. ThousandOaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.
- Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
- Tierney, Thomas F. 1993. The Value of Convenience: A Genealogy of Technical Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press.
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