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Caring for older adults is an increasingly complex and multi-dimensional global concern. This article provides a comprehensive definition of the older adult care experience and discusses its key components to help practitioners deliver older adult-centered care to maximize well-being outcomes for older adults.

Based on prior research on service operations, service experience, person-centered care and the unique, evolving needs of older adults regarding their care, this paper develops a conceptual framework in which the older adult care experience is the central construct, and key dimensions of well-being are the outcomes.

The older adult care experience is shaped by older adults' perceptions and evaluations of the care that they receive. Older adult-centered care has autonomy, dignity, unique needs and social environment as its core dimensions and results in those older adults feel empowered, respected, engaged and connected as part of their experience. The article also discusses how such experience can be evaluated by using quality dimensions from service operations, hospitality and healthcare contexts, and challenges that service firms may face in creating older adult care experience.

Given the changing demographics and unique needs of older adults, it is an imperative for academics and practitioners to have an understanding of what determines older adult care experience to better serve them. Such understanding is important as by creating and fostering older adult care experience, service organizations can contribute to individual and societal well-being.

To the authors' best knowledge, this is the first paper to provide a comprehensive conceptualization of the older adult care experience.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the benefits for aged care providers of adding affordable robotic technology to their services packages to enhance the well-being of older adults from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds who choose to live at home.

This study, adopting a transformative service research lens, was performed with a group of older Australian adults from CALD backgrounds aged approximately 70 years. This study conducted four rounds of home trials with three different, commercially available robotic technologies from January to November 2020. Each trial lasted seven days.

The findings reveal that older adults from CALD backgrounds are open to learning about new technologies and can successfully interact independently with multiple robotic technologies in their own homes. The results indicate that robot technology has the potential to increase the well-being of older people by enhancing a sense of belonging, independence and quality of life while living at home.

This study shows a promising future involving the use of available technology to assist older people from CALD backgrounds to live better lives at home. Ageing at home can be central to a person’s sense of identity and independence, and this study is a big step towards a new aged care system desperately needed in a society with a rapidly ageing population.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first to introduce three different commercially available robots, each designed to satisfy companionship, cleaning and/or communication needs in the homes of older adults from CALD backgrounds to increase their overall well-being.

Demand for long-term care services increases with population aging. This study aims to develop a conceptual model of elderly customers’ health-care experiences to explore the antecedents, mechanisms and outcomes of social participation in long-term care service organizations.

Using a two-phase data collection approach, this study collects data from 238 elderly customers in a long-term care service organization. The final data are analyzed through structural equation modeling.

The results show that care management efforts (i.e. customer education, perceived organization support, role modeling, perceived other customer support and diversity of activity) influence elderly customers’ psychological states (i.e. self-efficacy and sense of community), leading to increased social participation. In addition, high levels of social participation evoke positive service satisfaction and quality of life, both of which alleviate switching intention.

This study is one of the first conclusive service studies focused on the role of elderly customers’ social participation in their long-term care experience. The findings contribute to health-care service marketing and transformative service research, and expand understanding of elderly customers’ health-care experience, especially in long-term care service settings.

Besides the direct physical health consequences, through social isolation COVID-19 affects a considerably larger share of consumers with deleterious effects for their psychological well-being. Two vulnerable consumer groups are particularly affected: older adults and children. The purpose of the underlying paper is to take a transformative research perspective on how social robots can be deployed for advancing the well-being of these vulnerable consumers and to spur robotic transformative service research (RTSR).

This paper follows a conceptual approach that integrates findings from various domains: service research, social robotics, social psychology and medicine.

Two key findings advanced in this paper are (1) a typology of robotic transformative service (i.e. entertainer, social enabler, mentor and friend) as a function of consumers' state of social isolation, well-being focus and robot capabilities and (2) a future research agenda for RTSR.

This paper guides service consumers and providers and robot developers in identifying and developing the most appropriate social robot type for advancing the well-being of vulnerable consumers in social isolation.

This study is the first to integrate social robotics and transformative service research by developing a typology of social robots as a guiding framework for assessing the status quo of transformative robotic service on the basis of which it advances a future research agenda for RTSR. It further complements the underdeveloped body of service research with a focus on eudaimonic consumer well-being.

How to improve healthcare for the ageing population is attracting academia attention. Emerging technologies (i.e. robots and intelligent agents) look relevant. This paper aims to analyze the role of cognitive assistants as boundary objects in value co-creation practices. We include the perceptions of the main actors – patients, (in)formal caregivers, healthcare professionals – for a fuller network perspective to understand the potential overlap between boundary work and value co-creation practices.

We adopted a grounded approach to gain a contextual understanding design to effectively interpret context and meanings related to human–robot interactions. The study context concerns 21 health solutions that had embedded the Watson cognitive platform and its adoption by the youngest cohort (50–64-year-olds) of the ageing population.

The cognitive assistant acts as a boundary object by bridging actors, resources and activities. It enacts the boundary work of actors (both ageing and professional, caregivers, families) consisting of four main actions (automated dialoguing, augmented sharing, connected learning and multilayered trusting) that elicit two ageing value co-creation practices: empowering ageing actors in medical care and engaging ageing actors in a healthy lifestyle.

We frame the role of cognitive assistants as boundary objects enabling the boundary work of ageing actors for value co-creation. A cognitive assistant is an “object of activity” that mediates in actors' boundary work by offering novel resource interfaces and widening resource access and resourceness. The boundary work of ageing actors lies in a smarter resource integration that yields broader applications for augmented agency.

In aging societies all over the world, an increased understanding of age and age-related insights is critical to theory development, generalizations, model adaptations and managerial insights. Researchers and managers mostly rely on chronological age for adapting their approaches; they assume chronological age as a customers’ characteristic and neglect differing behaviors between individuals of the same age. When motivations enter the fray, chronological age as an individual’s attribute becomes indiscriminate. Consequently, findings adopting this age concept differ widely.

This special issue of the Journal of Services Marketing consists of ten articles that focus on different aspects of aging.

The articles change perspectives on age when describing ageing from an individual’s perspective. The articles also comment on social needs and discuss well-being in later life stages.

The authors offer a broad view on age and ageing to promote age-related research.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework that highlights transhumanism’s ideals of achieving superintelligence, super longevity and super well-being through human enhancement technologies (HET) and their relations with services marketing principles.

Framed by the transformative service research (TSR), this conceptual work articulates the 7Ps of the marketing mix with four macro-factors that create tensions at both the marketplace and consumer levels.

HET has potential for doing good but also tremendous bad; greater attention is needed from services marketing researchers especially in one proprietary research area: bioethics.

The authors contribute to the growing work on TSR investigating how the interplay between service providers and consumers affects the well-being of both. Additionally, the authors call for novel interdisciplinary work in transhuman services research.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first papers in services marketing research to explore the promises and perils of transhumanism ideals and human enhancement technologies.

Current and predicted continued dramatic increases in international migration and ethnocultural diversity of older adult cohorts pose challenges for health care services. Review studies on ethnoculturally diverse older adults and health care show a lack of focus on their service use experiences. This study aims to report a meta-ethnography that addresses this knowledge gap through answering the review question: How do ethnoculturally diverse older adults who are immigrants experience health careservices?

The authors applied a seven-phase method of meta-ethnography to guide the review. The authors conducted two literature searches (April 2018 and June 2020) in MEDLINE, CINAHL, Embase, Sociological Abstracts and Abstracts in Social Gerontology that yielded 17 papers eligible for review.

“There’s always something positive and something negative” is the overarching metaphor for answering the review question. Findings highlight positive and negative tensions within ethnoculturally diverse older adults’ health care use experiences of understanding and being understood, having trust in providers and the health care system, having needs, preferences and resources met and desire for self-care over dependency. The majority of experiences were negative. Tipping points towards negative experiences included language, fear, provider attitudes and behaviours, service flexibility, attitudes towards Western and traditional health care and having knowledge and resources.

The authors propose concrete actions to mitigate the tipping points. The authors discuss policy recommendations for health care system changes at the micro, meso and macro service levels to promote positive experiences and address mainstream service policy inequities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine disjunctures between the ways in which Canada’s Parent and Grandparent Supervisa is framed within policy documents and press releases, and how it is actually experienced by older adults and their adult children from the Global South who engage in intergenerational care exchanges once they reunify.

A case study involving qualitative interviews with a married couple (adult children), and official texts from Citizenship and Immigration Canada were analyzed, and subsequently categorized according to themes.

The findings of this paper first demonstrate how policies such as the Parent and Grandparent Supervisa and the revamped Family Sponsorship program are ostensibly made to alleviate the significant backlog of family reunification applications, but in reality streamline and categorize older adults from the Global South as visitors who are given minimal state entitlements. Second, the Parent and Grandparent Supervisa reinforces forms of structured dependency by placing the responsibility and burden of care onto sponsors who must provide financial, social, and health care to their older parents. Finally, official statements on the Parent and Grandparent Supervisa and restructured Family Sponsorship program ignore the complex intergenerational exchanges that take place to ensure the survival of the family unit.

Given the nature of the case study’s design, the study’s findings speak to the experiences of Analyn and Edwin; adult children who sponsored an older parent under the Parent and Grandparent Supervisa. Given the recency of the program, the issues highlighted provide a much-needed starting point in examining the Supervisa’s impact on families from the Global South. Moreover, future studies could critically assess how the highly gendered nature of care is experienced under Canada’s temporary reunification programs.

The study highlights the everyday challenges of sponsoring a parent under the Parent and Grandparent Supervisa. These issues are particularly important for policy makers and practitioners to assess and understand how such policies transform dynamics of care for families from the Global South. The unbalanced power dynamics raises questions on how to best support overburdened adult children, and vulnerable older parents who have no access to state resources.

The findings of this paper further the understanding of how families from the Global South provide and receive care under the Parent and Grandparent Supervisa. These experiences, however, are neglected within official state policies which frame older newcomers as visitors who are managed, and denied entitlements to state resources. Revealing disjunctures between policy and lived experiences can assist service providers, professionals, and policy makers to recognize how programs like the Parent and Grandparent Supervisa overburden the family unit, and exacerbate conditions of poverty and marginalization.

A framework for achieving what Heidegger referred to as a “fusion of horizons” of understanding, was developed during a study into the experience of a group of older adults receiving care. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The interpretive hermeneutic phenomenological methodology provided strategies for enabling a researcher to shift his or her understanding to be closer to that of the older adult receiving care, to better understand the experience of receiving care from the perspective of a recipient. Older adults participated in research exploring their everyday lived experiences, and contributed to the researcher’s understanding of the personal impact of care.

The older adults in this study perceived care in essentially relational terms, and raised the importance of maintaining personal autonomy and relationships as central to maintain meaning in daily life. This framework for successfully achieving a “fusion of horizons” during research is discussed and proposed as a potential strategy for also supporting active participation by adults in their own care provision.

This strategy might be used as a way of enhancing the engagement, safety and satisfaction of older adults, thereby also assisting to protect them from potentially negative influences of power differentials impacting on their care experience.