Sociology of values or sociology of morality?

Values and morality are the key concepts sociologists have been using to emphasize the normative dimension of social behavior since the very dawn of our discipline. Yet, while one can find two modern traditions of research concentrated around the concepts of values and morality in sociology, the strict relations between them are rarely explicitly addressed. In this article, we aim to analyze the concepts of values and morality as used in sociological theory and research, specifying the core meanings and contexts in which sociologists employ either of them. Based on this, we propose four analytical optics – empirical vs theoretical emphasis, moral vs non-moral values, bottom-up vs top-down approach, realism vs relativism – that help clarify the crucial features of the two strands in comparison to each other while suggesting the ways by which they may further complement each other.