Senior CATS

Search the Senior CATS Add a paper to the Senior CATS

Abstract: In this paper I mainly do two things. I am testing the idea of the traditional membership in civil society organizations not being something uniform, static and almost self evident but consisting of a number of dimensions or “building bricks”. The identified dimensions are then related to the individual member’s level of generalized trust.

I propose a new way of thinking of the formal membership. I argue that this relationship between individual and organization can take very different forms. I suggest seeing the membership as composed of a number of different building bricks that can be combined in several ways. In the paper I use data from an extensive quantitative survey among members in some of the largest Swedish membership organizations to identify these building bricks and more specifically their relationship with the individual’s level of generalized trust.

In a comparison between this rather extensive and empirically grounded model of the membership and a more elementary theory-driven model it’s demonstrated that a simple model of the membership may be difficult to work with because of inner conflicts may arise when working with small number of categories in an oversimplified model. An example of this type of inner conflicts is found when looking closer at the activity dimension of the membership. Different types of activity are demonstrated to have different impacts on trust. Activities involving cooperation among members towards the organization’s goal have a positive correlation with generalized trust while more individualistic, leisure time activities have a negative relationship with trust. It’s also demonstrated that participating in the internal democratic governance system is negatively correlated with trust. Finally the debate of learning of trust through associational membership versus the self selection-hypothesis is briefly discussed in the light of data that indicates an increasing level of trust depending on how long the individual has been member in the organization.

Keywords: Generalized Trust; Sweden; Membership Organizations

22 pages, July 4, 2007

Note: Paper submitted to EGOS-Colloquium 2007, Vienna, Austria, July 4-7, 2007

Full text files

senior2007_042.pdf  Full text

Download statistics

Report problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson ()
Questions about the papers in this series should be directed to Stefan Einarsson ()

RePEc:hhh:senior:2007_042

This page was generated 2009-11-02 09:56:55