Chapter 6. Ethnicity matters 123 counterevidence for when it undoubtedly arises in both public and private discourse on minority participation and membership. Rising fleetingness of membership ties Another important insight of my research is that membership dynamics in amateur football stimulate member ties between ethnic peers. As a consequence, heterogeneous club compositions lead to more member turnover. These findings, first of all, imply that the degree in which sports clubs serve as foci for the production of durable interethnic ties is limited, putting the popularized belief that clubs are ethnic integrators into question. Furthermore, as our society continues to ethnically diversify in the future (Jennissen et al., 2018), we should realize that this trend, at least on the short term, is likely to go hand in hand with an increase in the fleetingness of membership ties. This can have important ramifications for civil society organizations because, as mutual support organizations, their continuity depends for an important part on the stability of these ties. 6.2 Theoretical considerations Based on these findings, I would like to address several theoretical considerations regarding our understanding of the interrelations between organized sports and ethnicity. First of all, while the appeal of an ethnically neutral or even integrative sports domain is understandable, the results indicate that, on the whole, ethnicity acts as a social divider in organized sports. The ethnic background of oneself and that of others matters for the degree in which citizens become and stay members of amateur football clubs and to whom they are connected through their club memberships. Overall, membership ties are strengthened by ethnic similarity between club members, and it is weakened by ethnic dissimilarity. On the aggregated level, this favours an organizational field that is overall ethnically heterogeneous but marked by a substantial degree of ethnic segregation between relatively homogeneous clubs.
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