V

value. The term value is of importance to economics, sociology and philosophy. In economics the theory of value is usually co-terminous with the theory of price, but in Marxist economics this is not completely the case for value there is implicated in a theory of the distribution of the goods and services produced in a given economic order and in an assessment of the justice of this distribution. To the sociologist, values are constituent facts of social structure. The sociologist does not try to assess their intrinsic worth, but he treats them as scarce objects of socially conditioned desire, unevenly distributed and differentially ranked. In the Durkheimian sense of social fact they are given data for each individual, and constrain social behaviour towards them. This approach is often found emotionally cold and repulsive by social reformers, but values treated sociologically as structural elements largely derived from social interaction are essential constituents of social theory and their study an essential object of sociological research.