Values as an object of study for the American and the French sociology. A review of F. Znaniecki’s and R. Boudon’s perspectives

Even if the notion of “value” is studied for many disciplines, such as philosophy, sociology, anthropology, management, communication sciences, there is not one unitary perspective on this concept in the social sciences. Why it is important to study values? Because, we are living today in a society where everything is changing rapidly, with permanent changes in the economic, demographic, technological or social level, changes that have a strong effect on the individual (implicitly, his social role) on the family he is part of the work he does (implicitly, his job). It is, therefore, important to analyse the set of values for each generation, because the changes brought by the post-modern society have also been translated into values and there are values that can be found to a person who is a part of the “Millennials” and not to another person who is part of the “Generation X”. The article is presenting the most important theoretical perspectives on the concept of value. Even if there are a lot of sociologists who have studied it, this article is presenting, in a comparative way, two perspectives of two important scholars from American and French sociology. Even if Znaniecki and Boudon have lived in different periods of time (the beginning and the end of the XXth century) we may find a lot of similarities in their perspectives, especially on the topic of the “classical debate” between relativism and realism.