Search

The article introduces the theme of the articles featured in the issue. The main topics in all the papers presented in the issue revolve around study of various aspects of voluntary associations. The study of voluntary associations involves three separate theoretical concerns. The first, and perhaps oldest of these, focuses on the nature and structure of society, especially industrial society. A second theoretical interest in voluntary associations is social psychological in emphasis; here voluntary associations are examined for what they can tell us about the nature of the person in contemporary society. Finally, voluntary associations may be studied within the framework of organizational theory with a focus upon associations as the units to be studied. Four of the papers in this issue are directly concerned with the problem of the contribution of voluntary associations to the society in which they exist. Most studies of voluntary associations implicitly suggest that such groups are integrative.

Voluntary organizations have long been believed to have important effects on the attitudes of their members, but the relatively few attempts to investigate such effects have produced inconsistent results. This paper uses a statewide proportional sample to investigate relationships between (a) membership and participation in ten types of voluntary organizations and (b) two types of attitudes about the community. After individual and community characteristics were controlled, experience with voluntary organizations was found to explain about five percent of the variance in respondents' perceptions of their ability to influence community affairs, but relationships with willingness to leave the community were considerably weaker. Somewhat stronger relationships were found when the analysis was confined to respondents for whom voluntary organizations or community participation was particularly salient. Overall, this paper indicates that the impact of voluntary organizations on community attitudes is weaker than earlier theoretical statements have suggested. However, it also shows that the relationship varies according to type of organization, salience of participation for the respondent, respondents' sociodemographic characteristics, and the specific community attitude being investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the outcome of a research on various aspects of participation in voluntary organizations. Although there have been periodic discussions of the criteria for the category "voluntary associations," the term primarily designates a set of interests and questions rather than a special kind of organization. In addition, the literature on voluntary associations deals either with the question of participation or with the question of community function. This paper discusses participation in "voluntary associations" from an organizational analysis point of view. The research has focused on a single community of about 30,000 population. The data collected include two sample surveys, membership lists, basic identification data on most associations in the community, and full descriptive data on the associations. The aim of the paper is to report on a significant by-product of the research that may have considerable relevance for organizational analysis as well as for voluntary association interests.