Value: A Lost Concept in Sociology

Nick Gane (York)

Value was once one of the key concepts of sociology. Marxist sociology, for example, focussed on questions of economic value, labour and commodity exchange. Weberian sociology, meanwhile, applied a neo-Kantian framework to the study of values and meaning. But what has happened to the study of value today? This paper will argue, in response to the resurgence of positivism in sociology, that value – and the empirical more generally - is something that cannot simply be captured through measurement. This position will be explored, in the first instance, by returning to the work of Weber, in particular his distinction between the fate of art (which has a value that cannot be qualitatively surpassed) and the fate of science (which is ‘chained to the course of progress’). Interestingly, Weber gives little indication of where to place sociology within these two ‘fates’. This paper will argue that to be effective – and to engage a wider public audience - sociology must be both an art and a science. This argument will proceed by questioning what is meant by the ‘empirical’, along with the idea that empirical or sensory data are things that sociology can and should measure.