84 Ethnic sorting in football coordinate and control members’ behaviour successfully, and psychologically overwhelm individuals. From this perspective, one could say that ethnic heterogeneity makes things messy and complicated, and therefore acts as a source of social disarray. Drawing from the earlier synthesizing works from both Tolsma and Van der Meer (2014) and Koopmans et al. (2015), I suggest that the social disarray effect can be broken down into three different – although connected – mechanisms which set it apart from the intergroup threat approach. The first of these mechanisms is most straightforward and states that ethnic heterogeneous settings place a higher burden on interpersonal contact, decision making processes and cooperation. The primary reason for this is that ethnic differences tend to go hand in hand with various other social differences such as cultural differences or language differences which, together, make it increasingly difficult for group members to communicate with one another and reach agreement over values and goals. This negatively impacts the membership experience by either increasing its costs in terms of the time and resources spent or lowering its returns by diminishing the realization of collective goods. The second mechanism focuses on the importance of networks for group membership. When individuals form dense and exclusive networks, a property known as network closure, they tend to be more effective at monitoring and socially sanctioning each other’s behaviour (Coleman, 1990). Groups with high network closure are therefore able to put a higher premium on member commitment than groups made up out of more dispersed and disconnected networks. An important consequence of the homophily principle is that a group’s network structure is in part a function of its ethnic composition. Because network ties favour ethnic similarity over dissimilarity, homogeneous groups have the highest likelihood to form close-knit networks clusters high in closure. Conversely, as more and more ethnic differences are incorporated within a group, closure is progressively diminished by an increasing number of loose ends and gaps in the network. The third and last mechanism suggests, similarly to the intergroup threat approach, that ethnic heterogeneity may lead to psychological distress in individuals. Here, however, this effect is not caused by the presence of an easily distinguishable and threatening outgroup, but instead by a lack of ethnic similarity among group members, which, following the principle of meta contrast, hinders social categorization. The reason for this is that while social
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