Finalist for the OMT Division Best Student Paper Award
Values have had a difficult relationship with organizational and management scholarship—one characterized at times by a skewed substance ontology, at other times by a mix of confusion, derision and hype. And yet, values continue to fascinate us. To address these challenges and propose a new foundation for values research, this conceptual paper problematizes the “values” construct and literature in order to introduce four metaphors, based on the literature, that explore archetypical relationships between values and organizing—values-as-biology, values-as-mechanism, values-as-structure, and values-as-interactions—through which to organize the extant literature, circumscribe persistent problems of ontological drift and concept creep, and identify new research avenues. Finally, noting the persistent influence of the dominant social psychology construct proposed following calls to develop an objective “science of values”, I propose a fifth metaphor, values-as-dialectics, which grounds itself in the intersubjectivity and radical temporality of George Herbert Mead in order to propose an alternative, profoundly dynamic way to study values in a spirit of greater plurality.