Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Click here for more information Leadership, Fifth Edition

CiteULike is a free service for managing and discovering scholarly references - click here to get started.

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly
This Article
Right arrow Free Full Text (Free PDF) Free
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
0899764006297666v1
36/4/598    most recent
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in Web of Science
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Archibald, M. E.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

An Organizational Ecology of National Self-Help/Mutual-Aid Organizations

Matthew E. Archibald

Emory University

Although a considerable amount of research on modern self-help/mutual aid has been undertaken during the past several decades, studies have yet to address the question What are the organizational dynamics underlying the institutionalization of self-help/mutual aid? As a partial answer to this question, the author describes the central patterns of growth, decline, and persistence of national self-help/mutual-aid organizations, their formal diversification, and the extent to which subpopulations gain market share. In addition to using an organizational—ecological focus to map the trajectory of voluntary organizations, this article builds on resource partitioning theory by applying its central insights to subtypes of organizations. Expansion of self-help/mutual aid is remarkably similar to the trajectories of commercial and bureaucratic populations, but expectations that generalist concentration fosters growth of specialist organizations are not supported. Specialists dominate generalists except among medical self-help/ mutual aid. Implications for future research are discussed.

Key Words: organizational ecology • self-help/mutual aid • resource partitioning

This version was published on December 1, 2007

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 4, 598-621 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0899764006297666
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?