Value Consensus In Sociology

Theory

For functionalists, value consensus is the collective agreement on societal norms and values, which is seen as the essential foundation for a stable, orderly, and cohesive society. It is primarily achieved through the process of socialisation via key social institutions like the family and education.

Key Theorists

• Émile Durkheim: Argued that social order is maintained through cooperation and unity. He called this shared moral framework the collective conscience, a set of common beliefs and practices binding individuals together.

• Talcott Parsons (1939, 1951): Expanded Durkheim’s ideas, coining the term value consensus to describe the shared principles societies need to function. Parsons highlighted the role of social institutions like family and education in transmitting these values.

• Later Functionalists: Scholars such as Partridge (1971) and Marsh (2007) reinforced the view that shared values create predictability in social life, ensuring cooperation and reducing conflict.

Value consensus is the ‘social glue’ that binds people together, ensuring that society can function smoothly.

Functionalist theorists, particularly those in the tradition of Émile Durkheim, argue that for a society to be stable and strong, it requires social solidarity and integration, which are achieved through adequate socialisation into a shared system of norms and values.

Value consensus is this foundational agreement over a society’s core values. It is a broad level of agreement on fundamental principles, beliefs, and morals that the majority of a society’s members share.

According to Durkheim, these shared norms, beliefs, and values constitute a collective consciousness, or a shared way of understanding and behaving in the world.

This collective consciousness is the moral authority of society, binding individuals together, creating social integration, and limiting purely selfish desires which would otherwise lead to chaos.

In essence, the value consensus is the tangible expression of the collective conscience.

The Role and Purpose of Value Consensus

Functionalists see value consensus as essential for society to function correctly for several key reasons:

1. Maintaining Social Order and Stability: The primary function of value consensus is to ensure social order and stability. When the majority of people agree on and abide by the same set of rules, social life becomes predictable and harmonious. This agreement underpins social control, the regulation and enforcement of norms.
2. Promoting Social Cohesion and Solidarity: Sharing common values creates a sense of unity and belonging to a wider community. The communal practice of these values, for example in religion or education, brings people together and strengthens their social bonds. This shared culture acts as a form of “social glue”.
3. Guiding Behaviour and Roles: Values provide the general guidelines for a society, suggesting what is good or bad, desirable or undesirable. These values, in turn, shape the society’s norms, which are the specific rules that govern behaviour in particular situations. People learn to play their social roles according to these shared norms and values.
4. Enabling Social Integration: For society to function, people must subscribe to a common set of beliefs and values. Social institutions work to integrate people into society by instilling a commitment to shared values, which is necessary for a stable society.

How Value Consensus is Created and Maintained

Functionalists argue that value consensus is not automatic; it is actively created and reproduced from generation to generation through the process of socialization.

Socialization is the process through which people learn the rules, values, and beliefs of their society. The primary agents of socialisation are social institutions.

The Family:

The family is identified as a crucial agent of primary socialization.

It is here that children are first socialised into the core cultural values of their society.

For example, functionalist Talcott Parsons argued that families are ‘personality factories’ that produce citizens committed to the rules and belief systems necessary for a stable society.

Education:

Functionalists see the education system as a major secondary agent of socialisation that transmits and reproduces shared cultural values generation by generation.

According to Durkheim, schools are “socialization agencies that teach children how to get along with others and prepare them for adult economic roles”.

Education transmits core values like achievement, competition, and equality of opportunity.

This social reproduction, carried out through both the academic curriculum and the hidden curriculum, is what ensures value consensus.

Religion:

Religion also plays a key role by giving people a common set of beliefs, reinforcing social unity, and serving as an agent of social control by teaching moral behaviour.

When these institutions successfully socialise members into a shared value system, the result is value consensus, which in turn leads to social order.

State (Government):

The state helps create value consensus through formal social control, using laws, policies, and institutions to define acceptable behavior.

Legislation, taxation, and public campaigns can discourage harmful practices (e.g., smoking, pollution) while promoting desirable ones (e.g., renewable energy, education).

Governments also influence values more directly.

Historical examples, such as the Soviet Union’s 1930s experiment with abolishing traditional weekends, show how state policy can reshape daily life to prioritize state interests and weaken alternative loyalties.

In modern societies, governments often use a mix of incentives (“carrots”) and sanctions (“sticks”) to guide citizens toward shared norms.

By shaping routines, expectations, and opportunities, the state establishes the conditions for social agreement and order (Schwartz & Sagie, 2000).

Media:

The media plays a central role in shaping public opinion and reinforcing shared values.

By selecting which events, issues, and perspectives receive attention, media outlets define what is considered important or acceptable in society.

News, television, films, and now social media all provide narratives that promote common cultural values such as success, freedom, fairness, or security.

From a functionalist perspective, the media acts as a unifying force, giving people shared reference points and a sense of belonging to a wider community.

National events, public debates, or even popular entertainment can create collective experiences that strengthen social solidarity.

From a Marxist perspective, however, the media functions as part of the ideological state apparatus (Althusser, 1971).

Rather than reflecting neutral values, it reproduces ruling-class ideology – encouraging conformity, consumerism, and acceptance of existing power structures.

For example, advertising normalizes material success, while mainstream news may downplay structural inequalities.

Through constant repetition of messages, both overt (e.g., campaigns promoting tolerance) and subtle (e.g., stereotypes in entertainment), the media socializes individuals into a shared cultural framework.

In this way, it contributes significantly to value consensus, whether genuinely collective or skewed toward elite interests.

Critical Evaluation

In conclusion, while functionalists view value consensus as the bedrock of social order, a wide array of alternative sociological perspectives fundamentally challenge this notion.

They argue that it ignores power inequalities, overlooks conflict, denies individual agency, and fails to account for the diversity and fragmentation of modern life.

These criticisms suggest that what appears as consensus may in fact be a product of domination, ideology, or an oversimplified view of a complex social world.

Conflict Theory and Marxist Criticisms

Conflict theorists fundamentally reject the idea that societies are based on a shared, organic consensus over values.

Instead, they argue that society is characterised by conflict and inequality, and that what appears to be “value consensus” is actually the ideology of the dominant class imposed on the rest of society.

• Imposed Values, Not Shared Values: Conflict theorists argue that powerful groups, such as the capitalist class (or bourgeoisie), are able to impose their values on everyone else through social institutions like education, religion, and the media. The “consensus” is therefore manufactured and manipulated to serve the interests of the powerful, rather than being a natural expression of collective agreement. For Marxists, this ruling-class ideology presents a false picture of society that legitimises inequality and disguises the exploitation of the subject class.
• False Consciousness: This dominant ideology creates what Marxists call false consciousness. This is a state where the working class (proletariat) unknowingly accepts the belief system of the ruling class, which works against their own best interests. Ideas such as competition being more valuable than cooperation, or that hard work is its own reward, primarily benefit the owners of industry. This prevents the poor from questioning their position in society and challenging the status quo.
• Education as a Tool of Ideological Control: Marxists see the education system not as a transmitter of shared societal values for the collective good, but as an Ideological State Apparatus that reproduces class inequality and instils values that benefit capitalism, such as obedience and conformity. The hidden curriculum, for example, teaches a set of values that supports the existing social hierarchy. Rather than promoting social mobility, education legitimises social inequality by creating the myth of meritocracy.
• Overlooking Conflict and Power: A major criticism of the functionalist model is that by focusing on consensus and stability, it overlooks the pervasive inequality and dissensus in society. It minimises the ways institutions contribute to social inequality and neglects the role of the powerful in shaping what is considered normal or criminal. 

Feminist Criticisms

Feminist theory, a branch of conflict theory, criticises the concept of value consensus for ignoring gender inequality and perpetuating patriarchy (male domination).

• Patriarchal Values: Feminists argue that the “shared values” functionalists describe are often patriarchal values that benefit men at the expense of women. For instance, traditional family values that assign men the instrumental (breadwinner) role and women the expressive (carer) role are presented as natural and functional, but feminists see this as a patriarchal ideology justifying sexism and gender inequality.
• Ignoring the ‘Dark Side’ of the Family: The functionalist focus on the family as a positive and essential institution ignores its dysfunctional aspects, such as domestic violence and child abuse, which disproportionately affect women and children. Feminists point out that the family, far from being a harmonious unit based on shared values, can be a site of oppression for its female members.

Symbolic Interactionist and Interpretivist Criticisms

Symbolic interactionist perspectives criticise the functionalist macro-level view for being overly deterministic and ignoring the agency of individuals.

They focus on how reality is socially constructed through micro-level interactions.

• Individuals as Active Agents: Interactionists reject the idea that people are passive recipients of societal values poured into them during socialisation. Instead, they argue that individuals actively construct their roles and identities through negotiation and interpretation in their daily interactions. People are not simply puppets of social forces; they have agency and can choose to accept, modify, or reject societal norms. The existence of anti-school subcultures, for example, shows that the hidden curriculum and the transmission of dominant values can fail in practice.
• Social Construction of Reality: From an interactionist viewpoint, there is no objective social reality. Instead, reality is what humans cognitively construct it to be through their interactions. Health and illness, for instance, are social constructions; conditions are only considered “ill” if they are defined as such by society. This challenges the functionalist idea of universal norms and values that exist independently of individual interpretation.
• Critique of Research Methods: Interpretivist sociologists are highly critical of the official statistics that positivists (including many functionalists) use as “social facts” to support their theories. They argue these statistics are not objective facts but social constructions – the end product of decisions made by various groups like the public, victims, and the police. For example, crime statistics may tell us more about police racism than about the actual extent of criminality among different ethnic groups.

Postmodernist Criticisms

Postmodernists challenge the very idea of a single, shared “value consensus” or a dominant culture, arguing that contemporary society is characterised by diversity, fragmentation, and choice.

• Diversity and Fragmentation: Postmodernists argue that grand theories like Functionalism are outdated because society is no longer a unified whole with a single shared culture. Instead, it is fragmented into a multitude of groups and lifestyles. In this view, modern schools reproduce diversity rather than inequality, and people are free to construct their own identities from a range of influences like gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and religion, rather than being constrained solely by social class and dominant values.
• Rejection of a ‘Normal’ Family: Postmodernists reject the functionalist idealisation of the nuclear family. They argue there is no single “correct” or “normal” family type; instead, family life is characterised by choice and diversity, and all arrangements have equal value. The nuclear family has become fragmented and dismantled. The idea that society is based on one consensus is a conservative ideology that devalues other lifestyles.