Self-Help and Mutual Aid: An Emerging Social Movement?

This paper reviews the social science literature that has appeared in the past two decades on self-help and mutual aid groups. It starts with a brief description of the nature, scope, and magnitude of current self-help mani­ festations, and a sketch of scholarly work concerning them. Indigenous and largely spontaneous groups organized on the self-help/mutual aid pattern constitute an important variety of informal, voluntary associations in modern societies; they have received little systematic study by social scientists.