Self-help groups and human service organizations: An interorganizational perspective

In this article, we examine the conditions that give rise to relations between human service organizations and self-help groups and the forms that such relations may assume. Using an interorganizational perspective, we develop a model that compares self-help groups and human service organizations. This model is used to derive propositions about the conditions that lead to interorganizational relations between these two kinds of social organizations and to generate hypotheses about the forms that such relations can assume, namely, competition or cooperation.