Scaling Formal Voluntary Organizations As An Element of Community Structure

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Formal voluntary organizations are viewed as integral parts of community structure and measured by means of scalogram and factor analytic techniques. A Guttman scale orders the organizations along the dimension of the instrumental-expressive typology with the higher-order scale steps consisting of more instrumental organizations. The results of a factor analysis serve to confirm the unidimensional character of the FVO scale. Evidence of the utility of the scale in comparative community research is suggested by the positive correlation between scale scores and the number of public issues reported for each center. There are few systematic studies of formal voluntary organizations (FVOs) as integral parts of community structure; some notable exceptions are Young and Larson (1965) and Clark (1968). Instead one finds that a majority of studies treat individual participation in voluntary organizations rather than analyzing organizations in their institutional settings (Axelrod, 1956; Bell and Force, 1956; Babchuk and Booth, 1969). The fact that a large volume of organizational activity for modern communities occurs in voluntary associations would seem to justify their inclusion as significant parts of community social structure. A theoretical rationale for analyses of voluntary organizations in their institutional settings derives in part from the literature on pluralistic social structures. Drawing upon the classical work of de Tocqueville (1961) American social scientists have shown considerable interest in voluntary organizations as an integral part of contemporary social life. Kornhauser (1958) for example advances the thesis that social integration in industrial societies depends primarily on the development of autonomous organizations that can mediate between primary groups and government. A large volume of literature representing studies conducted by sociologists and political scientists is concerned with relationships between organizations and the polity (Adrian, 1958; Maccoby, 1958; Dahl, 1961; Presthus, 1964; Erbe, 1964). Viewed from this frame of reference, a principal function of FVOs concerns their potential as mechanisms of power and/or integration within the system. Specifically, this involves the intervention of FVOs between masses and elites often resulting in a more pluralistic social structure. Within this perspective reference is often made to the potential of the collectivity (voluntary or involuntary) for channeling individual commitments toward community goals. A more social-psychological approach analyzes the integrative function of FVOs in terms of their responsiveness to members' immediate needs. These functions are basic to the formation of the instrumentalexpressive organizational typology, as developed by Gordon and Babohuk (1959). The dimensions on which the typology is based are also found in earlier writings on voluntary organizations (Lundberg et al., 1934; Komarovsky, 1946; Rose, 1955). Although the literature includes several typologies of FVOs, there is no empirical evidence of voluntary organizations as variable measures of community social structure. Needless to say, innumerable typologies of formal voluntary organizations have appeared in the literature (Blau and Scott, 1962; Simpson and Gulley, 1962; Rose, 1955). We shall present evidence of a unidimensional specialization for FVOs and show that this specialization moves from a relatively expressive type of