Values are essential to understand but difficult to define. As any set of acts in everyday work is value-driven (Askeland et al., 2020), values can be understood as ‘that which is worth having, doing, and being (i.e., norma-tive goods or “ends”)’ (Selznick, 1992, p. 60). However, if you ask organ-isational members to define their values or elaborate on their organisation’s values, they often have problems answering. If you ask them to define the values that are important to them on a personal level, their answers will most likely be quite divergent and not necessarily reflect their employer’s official core values.In short, although values are desirable, they can also be multiple, diverse, abstract, tacit, hidden, temporary and conflicting. This curious nature of values makes them notoriously difficult to research in practice. And yet, because they are so important for actions, practice, decisions, policies and communication on both individual and organisational lev-els, having a solid methodological basis for doing research on them seems to be exactly what is needed in order to advance insights into their signifi-cance. Values research could, for example, provide in-depth insights into social order (Scott, 2013) and social needs (Selznick, 2008). It could bring out fruitful discussions of identity, ‘ethos’ and the purposive insti-tutional work of leaders and organisational members. It could reveal how values emerge and dwindle, which values carry moral weight in decisions and interactions, which values enter into conflict with each other and with what consequences and how values are affected by other causal forces (Kraatz et al., 2020).