From the kids to ‘The Kids’ – the development of negative social capital I a Little League Baseball organization

Abstract

Based on extensive fieldwork within a youth baseball league in the American Southwest, this paper has two goals. First, I make a conceptual distinction between the dark side of social capital and what I term “negative social capital.” Second, I detail how negative social capital developed and was deployed within the Valley City Little League, with an emphasis on origins and the consequences for both the individuals involved as well as the league as a whole. I also examine how negative social capital was able to develop in a child-centered voluntary organization, an anomaly within extant research on negative relationships in such organizations.