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Key Words values measurement, attitudes, social structure and personality, self
Abstract Over the past decades, the concept of values has gone in and out of fashion within sociology. Relatively recent advances in both the conceptualization and measurement of values offer the potential for a reincorporation of values into sociological work. Sociologists often employ cursory understandings of values, imbuing values with too much determinism or viewing them as too individually subjective. The concept is employed sporadically in sociological subdisciplines. This review maps out the contours of the various approaches to linking values with culture, social structure, and individual behavior. We discuss theoretical and empirical approaches to values, organizing the broad literature to address three questions: (a) What are values? (b) Where do values come from? and (c) What do values do? We identify important research findings and suggest areas for future inquiry.
INTRODUCTION
It seems de rigeur in sociological writing to tack on the phrase "norms and values" to explanations of human behavior to connote the taken-for-granted process through which social structures regulate the actions of individuals. Sociologists often employ cursory understandings of values, labeling a broad array of social psychological phenomena as values. Often, values are considered in an overdetermined way as "causing" observed behaviors. More often, values are ignored as too subjective or too difficult to measure accurately. Sociological work expressly on values-both the nature of individual value systems and values' place in action-has been sparse since the mid-1960s (Hechter 1992, Spates 1983). The concept drifts in and out of such subdisciplines of sociology as family, organization, and politics. When employed, "the term 'values' has been used variously to refer to interests, pleasures, likes, preferences, duties, moral obligations, desires, wants, goals, needs, aversions and attractions, and many other kinds of selective orientations" (Williams 1979, p. 16).
Today, when one reads about values across the disciplines of sociology, psychology, philosophy, and political science, the balkanized nature of the research is striking.1 There is little coherence between the different approaches used across conceptualization and measurement of values. Most surprising is the almost complete lack of reference that the major empirical researchers on values make to relevant social theory, and vice versa.2 The few strands of recent sociological research on values (Hechter 1993, Inglehart & Baker...