104 Ethnic sorting in football Even though McPherson's model of an ecology of affiliation is primarily based on the idea that people gravitate and stay with organizations and groups with high ingroup shares, the outcomes of the previous chapter have showed that the diversity of the outgroup is another important factor driving ethnic sorting in membership. Consequently, I will look at the ethnic composition of clubs both in terms of ingroup share and outgroup fractionalization. In the remainder of this chapter, I will first briefly describe McPherson's ecological model of affiliation and how it relates to my findings on outgroup fractionalization. Subsequently, I will formulate a set of expectations about how transfers between clubs may relate to their ethnic compositions. This is followed by a section in which I will explain the data and measures that are used in this study, after which I will present the study’s results and discuss them in light of the expectations. Finally, in the last section, I will sum up the study’s main findings and go over their implications. 5.2 Competition over members in social space: an ecological model of affiliation Social space Social space, also described as Blau space or socio-demographic space, is a theoretical tool that was developed by McPherson (1983; 2004) to visualize social differences and similarities between people. Social space can be understood as a system in which socially significant attributes, such as ethnicity, gender, income or education each form distinct dimensions, generating a multidimensional property space in which individuals or other social entities such as groups and organizations occupy specific positions. The simplest depiction of social space only incorporates two dimensions, such as income and education. In this case, social space can be illustrated as a two-dimensional box in which any position within the box corresponds to a specific combination of educational level and income along its x-axis and y-axis.16 16 While ‘true’ social space would incorporate every socially significant attribute as a separate dimension, visualizing all these dimensions simultaneously would not be possible. Consequently, Popielarz and McPherson (1995) refer to boxes that depict over two dimensions of social space ‘hyperboxes’.
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