The culture of 'value'

Western society (and perhaps beyond) seems to be increasingly interested in understanding the meaning of the word 'value'. We talk about clashes of civilisations, clashes of cultural groups, new management practices to deliver better 'value' to customers, changes in values in society, etc. All these seemed to generate a personal interest to talk about the meaning of value.

An Oxford dictionary defines value in three terms: 1) The 'worth' of something (presumably to be exchanged by other things like money); 2) A moral standard o professional code of conduct; and 3) a quantity or number.

In all these, an issue is to try to find a meaning we all agree, possibly an exact and accurate representation of the value(s) we discuss. Not surprisingly, since the Greeks this issue has been discussed. We have disciplines that aim to work with values, and somehow try to elicit answers to questions related to values. Ethics and morality, economics, mathematics, etc. All they seem to work towards such elicitation, understanding, leading possibly to get some wisdom.

Nowadays we have marketing to help us finding the value that customers put into products. And we have activities of conflict resolution, justice and democracy which help us accommodate different perceptions, different values. Perhaps the most successful are those which link technological development to assign value to electronic information and its management.

I thought that as discipline, systems thinking was different, but nowadays I find myself that when we say we work with complex problems, that we look at a situation from different perspectives, that we reflect on potential consequences of decisions, we are trying to elicit different values from different people and work with them. We might be doing this out of a moral commitment to the betterment of society (good!), but why do we claim we are trans-disciplinary?

Perhaps we need to look at our own understanding of the meaning of 'value', and how we can work with other understandings.

Au jour d'hui, je me sense tres content, parce que j'ai reservé deux chambres pour passer trois jours en Rennes. Je ai parlé en Francais!