CHAPTER 5 Off to greener pitches? 5.1 Exploring the relationship between member transfers and club composition In the previous chapter of this dissertation, I demonstrated that low ethnic ingroup shares and high ethnic outgroup fractionalization lead to member dropout in amateur football clubs for all ethnic backgrounds. Together with selective entry, this process of selective exit functions as an important mechanism through which the ethnic homogeneity and segregation clubs is sustained over time. Composition driven member recruitment and retention can be regarded as a constitutive part of McPherson and colleagues’ ecological model of affiliation. In this model, it is assumed that groups and organizations compete over members based on the ingroup ties they offer to potential and current members. On the macro level, the outcome of this process is an organizational patchwork, because in order to exist over time, groups are inclined to socially specialize (McPherson, 1983, 2004; McPherson & Smith-Lovin, 2002; Popielarz & McPherson, 1995). While ethnic sorting in recruitment and – albeit to a lesser extent - retention have both been studied in the past (McPherson et al., 2001, Wiertz, 2016), so far little attention has been paid to the interplay between these processes. However, following the logic of McPherson's ecology of affiliation, if clubs vary in their ability to recruit and retain members with certain backgrounds, they may also be more or less likely to recruit certain members from other clubs or lose certain members to them. In this final empirical chapter, I will therefore focus on members that change clubs and explore whether transfers between clubs follow a pattern of ethnic sorting. To this end, I have formulated the following research question: To what extent are transfers of members between clubs related to differences between clubs’ ethnic compositions?
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