Introduction: why value?

In a fundamental sense the notion of ‘value’ is the origin and motivation of all economic behaviour. At the same time, but from a very different perspective, ideas of value permeate the sphere of culture. In the economic domain, value has to do with utility, price and the worth that individuals or markets assign to commodities. In the case of culture, value subsists in certain properties of cultural phenomena, expressible either in specific terms, such as the tone value of a musical note or the value of a colour in a painting, or in general terms as an indication of the merit or worth of a work, an object, an experience or some other cultural thing. Of course both economics and culture, as areas of human thought and action, are concerned with values in the plural – i.e. the beliefs and moral principles which provide the framework for our thinking and being.