Elusive nature of fundamental values: practice

In Quest of Engaging Values (Part #2)

It is readily assumed that it is obvious what values are and that it is therefore a simple matter to understand them. In engaging in further discussion of values, and despite responsibility over decades for a "values" project (discussed below), a preliminary confession is in order. It is quite unclear to the writer what "values" "are" in "reality".

Despite the extensive literature on what values are, this recognition seems to be in accord with that of others. For example:

Behind the misty wall of words, the diverse, even contradictory, interpretations, motivations and utilisations are an indication of fundamental divisions concerning values. In particular, the most basic human rights are more frequently invoked as a weapon of attack or defence against some party, rather than recognized as the royal road to a positive relationship between individuals and groups in an objective form of fraternity. René Maheu, Director-General, UNESCO
In contrast with what is commonly assumed, a description, when carefully inspected, reveals the properties of the observer. We, observers, distinguish ourselves precisely by distinguishing what we apparently are not, the world. Francisco Varela

It was in this spirit that it appeared appropriate to explore values as "strange attractors" in psycho-social systems, in the light of the subtler understanding of the complexity sciences (Human Values as Strange Attractors: coevolution of classes of governance principles, 1993). As such they could be understood as phenomena beyond the typical definitional game-playing with which exploration of values is most frequently associated. Values are not conventional conceptual objects. Any assumption that they can be so treated disconnects whatever they are from the manner in which they function in psycho-social systems -- and above all from the process whereby people engage with them.

As cited in that study, Walter Truett Anderson (Reality: Isn't what it used to be, 1990) reviewed the challenge as follows:

The conservative indictment is correct, and yet the strategy that logically follows from it -- to rebuild consensus, to get a core of standard values and beliefs in place in every American mind -- is doomed to fail. To see that you only need to look at the variety of things being offered by people who are in favour of some such consensus building (p. 4).

Anderson comments on a group of conflicting proposals then continues:

All of these proposals make sense, in a way. Each of them looks good to certain groups of people, particularly those whose values and beliefs are the ones being proposed for the national culture. And I am sure the great majority of Americans have never heard of any of these people, or their books. Humpty-Dumpty is not going to be put back together again. Efforts to do so are ultimately self-defeating, because campaigns to make people choose any particular system of value and belief tend to have the subversive effect of informing people that they are free to choose systems of value and belief. (p. 5).

A preface by Chris Mowles (Values in international development organisations: negotiating non-negotiables, Development in Practice, 18, 1 2008, pp. 5 - 16) to an extensive discussion can be fruitfully quoted at some length because of its frankness regarding these matters in practice:

As a consultant to international NGOs (INGOs), I am often asked by staff and managers to work with values. A number of patterns repeat themselves in the interchanges between us, and there are unspoken assumptions about the role of values in organisational life that I am expected to share. The principal of these is that an organisation can 'have' values, and that they should be fully shared by the employees: the way to undertake strategy, then, is to have a strong vision for the organisation, which is a way of realising the organisation's mission and values; and to find ways of airing this vision so that employees can commit themselves to it. Often I am enjoined to help staff and managers to 'close the gap' in practice between what they aspire to do and what they actually find themselves doing....

Over the past ten years I have been struck by how often values, which are supposed to be a source of organisational solidarity and motivation, end up being cited by managers and staff alike as one of the principal causes of their discontent with each other, or indeed for partner organisations' discontent with INGOs.... How do staff and managers who work in organisations with an overtly moral mission tend to explain and exercise that morality with regard to each other?

Values are... also frequently a source of demoralisation and destructive conflict. This is because the prevailing perceptions of values as instruments of management or as elements in some inchoate mystical whole render the power relationship between staff and managers undiscussable. Values need not be thought of as an instrument of management, and they are above all idealisations. An alternative theory of values is that they are emergent and intensely social phenomena that arise daily between people engaged in a collective enterprise.

If a world leader, such as Margaret Thatcher (Interview, Women's Own magazine, 31 October 1987) can famously assert ... there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families., what then can be said of "values" -- or of the "organization" or "culture" claiming them? As noted by Martin L.W. Hall (Systems Thinking and Human Values: towards understanding the chaos in organizations, 1999) in a commentary: There is really no such thing as an organizational value. It is really the manifestation of personal values in a larger context. To what extent do they then "exist"? Who has ever seen a value? Which declared "universal" values have not been meaningfully experienced by those expected to subscribe to them?

It is of course vital to recognize how a cluster of essentially nebulous values may be implicitly held in ways that do not lend themselves to unambiguous explication. The best example is the indication of "American values" in terms of a "dream" -- as in the "American Dream" (and "I Have a Dream" as presented by Rev. Martin Luther King) -- appropriately recognized as being challenged by the "spectre" of terrorism instigated by those who do not share such beliefs. The dream framing is interestingly challenged by controversy regarding the corresponding possibility of a "European Dream". The challenge for others is in the expectation that they should be "encouraged" to share such nebulous dreams and the associated values. Failure in such "belief" may result in extreme sanctions against "unbelievers". The nebulous nature of such belief highlights the degree to which society is "bedevilled" by the unsayable and the unsaid (Global Strategic Implications of the "Unsaid" From myth-making towards a "wisdom society", 2003).

On the other hand Francisco Parra-Luna (Axiological Systems Theory: a general model of society. tripleC, 2008) argues:

Societal problems can be defined as some kind of axiological disequilibrium since values can be considered to be the raw material, which founds social phenomena. If 'values' is the 'degree of usefulness or suitability of things to satisfy necessities', or to use more sociological terms, if 'value is an element of a shared symbolic system which serves as the criterion for choosing between alternatives for orientation", then, it can be extrapolated that everything, or almost everything in the field of human relations, can be considered as an enormous and complex framework of necessities and interests which can only be satisfied through the achievement of values.