In response to a series of influential government reports that have been critical of the
approaches taken by, and outputs of, the UK construction industry, human aspects of
construction have been given a new significance, particularly issues of value as judged
by diverse stakeholders. This paper seeks to relate diverse and applied notions of value
in construction with a similarly diverse body of knowledge contained within social and
environmental psychology on values, from the work of Maslow and others in the 1950s
and 1960s, to more recent contributions by Schwartz and colleagues. Collectively, the
paper describes the work of an inter-disciplinary team with the active participation of
key stakeholders in construction: professional organisations, practitioners, construction
companies, clients and end product users, focused upon the search for a new 'language
of value' that can aid the adoption of innovative conceptualisations of value within the
industry. Finally, an innovative framework of value is presented that has been
developed for design practitioners in the non-domestic building industry