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Abstract

There are different notions of what “value” is and means and this is deeply related to its intrinsic content and meta-disciplinary nature. One of the fundamental characteristics of value is that it presents different facets in relation to different points of view and to different contexts: in a word, its versatility. The concept of value has invested and continues to invest the interest of many scholars from different disciplines, especially for the various connotations that it may take and the complexity of its theoretical settlement. Philosophers, economists and, more recently, sociologists and psychologists have referred to “value” with very different approaches and meanings. This has caused some problems related to their lack of agreement about its meaning. A study of the literature reveals a lot of variations of the value concept, for example, in accounting literature the word “value” is often used with a meaning of “quantity”, without giving adequate space to the “quality” aspect of the same concept.