Organizations and Alienation: The Mediation Hypothesis Revisited

Abstract

It is a widely accepted premise of mass society theory that voluntary associations play an important integrating role in modern society by mediating between the individual and the remote influences on life, work, and politics. There are two major variants of the mediation hypothesis: (1) purely social interaction within organizations lessens alienation in immediate relationships; (2) interaction accompanied by political exposures reduces alienation in the political domain. Controlling for social class, activity in instrumental, political groups is associated with significantly lower levels of political alienation. Activity in nonpolitical, social organizations is found to have more general attitudinal consequences—both for levels of social alienation and for estrangement from political processes. These patterns suggest that, despite the consistent effects of SES on nonalienative beliefs, voluntary associations provide independent settings of social and political integration.