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Soc Indic Res (2016) 129:699716
DOI 10.1007/s11205-015-1142-z
Joonmo Son1
Accepted: 4 October 2015 / Published online: 6 October 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Abstract It has been a widespread practice in the literature to measure organizational social capital with a summated scale of the number of memberships in voluntary associations. However, treating all associations alike may produce biased conclusions. This study therefore proposes that institutional afliation, dened as a socially contextualized pattern of group belonging, is a form of organizational social capital. Specically, I suggest that there are three types of institutional afliations. First, the primary afliation is composed of groups in which members share strong ties and bond together with personal, empathic, and enduring relationships. Second, the secondary afliation comprises certain associations that seek to achieve their proclaimed goals within or beyond their collectivities, in the latter case possibly reaching to the level of a wider community or a whole society. Lastly, the dual afliation exists as an intersection between the two prior afliations. Using a nationally representative data set from Korea, the study found that both primary and secondary afliations are related to occupational status, whereas only the secondary afliation is associated with civic actions. However, dual afliation is redundant and unable to form a positive association with either outcome. In conclusion, this study suggests that institutional afliation is an alternative measure of organizational social capital, taking the contextual characteristics of associations in a case country into account.
Keywords Institutional afliation Organizational social capital Status attainment
Civic engagement
& Joonmo Son [email protected]
1 Department of Sociology, FASS, National University of Singapore, AS1 #04-24, 11 Arts Link,
Singapore 117570, Singapore
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1 Introduction
This study proposes that institutional afliation, dened as a socially contextualized pattern of group belonging, is a form of organizational social capital (Newton 2001; Wilson 2000). Specically, institutional afliation denotes that people in a society tend to form certain patterns of group belonging out of various associations that were created due to individual and collective needs. Apart from individual choices of associations, a variety of social factors such as culture, history, religion, or education may...