80 Ethnic sorting in football members have more social ties that are external to the organization, which in turn also have a greater likelihood of linking to groups with a higher degree of similar others. In other words, organizations do not only pull dissimilar members in less, but dissimilar members on average also experience greater outward pulls from competing organizations. Together these processes all work in the same, selfreinforcing and conservative way, namely to drive dissimilar members out and contribute to the continuous homogenisation of organizations. Homophily links ethnic heterogeneity to member dropout because heterogeneous groups on average offer less ties to ethnic peers to members than homogeneous groups. All things being equal, this makes them less attractive to be a member of. However, the principle that higher levels of heterogeneity equals to fewer ethnic peers does not necessarily hold true for each respective group simultaneously. In fact, in ‘quasi-mono-ethnic countries’ which are dominated by a single ethnicity, such as the Netherlands, ethnic heterogeneity and ingroup size tend to be inversely related for the majority group, but directly related for most minority groups (Koopmans & Schaeffer, 2015). Many previous studies on the social consequences of ethnic heterogeneity have refrained from properly addressing this relational aspect of heterogeneity by only considering overall levels of heterogeneity, regardless of individuals’ specific ethnicity. While the homophily principle still dictates that higher degrees of ethnic heterogeneity on the organizational level on average results in more dropout, poor or contrasting correlations between organizational heterogeneity and ethnic group shares may greatly obscure an effect. Hence, to study the impact of homophily as a pathway through which ethnic heterogeneity can lead to member dropout, it becomes necessary to directly take individual’s ethnic ingroup share in the organization into account instead, which leads to the following hypothesis: H1: Ethnic ingroup share is negatively associated with dropout Besides an inverse relationship between ethnic ingroup share and member dropout, the homophily principle has important additional implications for quasimono-ethnic contexts. The reason for this is that ethnic group size strongly determines the opportunity structure for homophilic tie-formation. Under these circumstances, individuals who belong to the ethnic majority group are often guaranteed to find one or more organizations in which their ingroup dominates demographically. For ethnic minorities, however, the opposite holds true. Their
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