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The purpose of this paper is to help senior center managers and service researchers understand why some patrons experience health benefits, primarily fatigue relief, through senior center day services participation.

The authors conduct two separate studies at a senior center. The first study represents a grounded theory that offers an original, basic social process regarding mental restoration in senior centers. The second study draws on Attention Restoration Theory (ART) and employs survey methodology.

Senior center patrons who perceive a center's restorative stimuli experience health benefits such as relief from four types of fatigue, enhanced quality of life, and improved physical and mental well-being.

The paper shows that senior centers may be relatively inexpensive, non-medical services that can help patrons relieve fatigue symptoms, which are often treated with pharmaceutical medication and medical visits. A limitation is the small sample size, which restricts generalizability.

The results show that senior center managers may promote patron health by fostering service designs and programs that allow members to temporarily escape from everyday life and interact in an ever-changing environment that fosters a sense of belonging.

Senior center day services help patrons relieve fatigue, and its symptoms, in an affordable, non-medical, and non-pharmaceutical manner.

The paper clarifies the role of senior centers in patrons’ lives by drawing on ART. Senior centers that can offer patrons restorative environments are likely to play a significant role in patrons’ physical, social, and mental well-being.

This paper explores managerial issues in call centres through two intensive case studies in UK organisations, supplemented by interviews with five operations managers in other call centres. The research explores key issues from the perspective of managers, team leaders, and customer‐service agents. Our findings show a growing professionalism among those working in call centres ‐ in keeping with the prominent role played by call centres in the market value chains of many organisations. Managers are under pressure to meet the potentially conflicting goals of customer service and efficiency in variable circumstances which cause the work load on call centres to alter significantly. In this environment, decisions on the use of technology, and on the roles, skills, and competencies of customer agents, are critical. So too are the ways in which human resource practices are employed in this relatively new and fast‐growing form of organisation.

Social isolation and loneliness are global issues experienced by many seniors, especially immigrant and refugee seniors. Guided by the five-stage methodological framework proposed by Arksey and O’Malley and more recently Levac, Colquhoun and O’Brien, the purpose of this paper is to explore the existing literature on social isolation and loneliness among immigrant and refugee seniors in Canada.

The authors conducted a literature search of several databases including: PubMed; MEDLINE; CINAHL; Web of Science; HealthStar Ovid; PschyInfo Ovid; Social Services Abstracts; AgeLine; Public Health Database, Google Scholar and Cochrane Library. In total, 17 articles met the inclusion criteria.

Based on the current literature five themes related to social isolation and loneliness emerged: loss; living arrangements; dependency; barriers and challenges; and family conflict.

Given the increasing demographic of aging immigrants in Canada, it is useful to highlight existing knowledge on social isolation and loneliness to facilitate research, policy and programs to support this growing population.

The population is aging around the world and it is also becoming increasingly diverse particularly in the high-income country context. Understanding and addressing social isolation is important for immigrant and refugee seniors, given the sociocultural and other differences.

Social isolation is a waste of human resource and value created by seniors in the communities.

The paper makes a unique contribution by focusing on immigrant and refugee seniors.

With the continued growth of senior citizen usage of the Internet, the special needs of this user group have become identified and Web sites are being specifically marketed toward them. Since libraries have been identified as a major provider of Internet services for this group, it is important that librarians be aware of the unique Web sites for the older adult. The Platinum Web is an annotated bibliography of the most significant Web sites dedicated to the older user.

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.

Senior citizen falls are one of the highest-cost factors of healthcare within this population group. Various approaches for automatic fall detection exist. However, little is known about the seniors’ acceptance of these systems. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the acceptance of automatic fall detection devices as well as the technological commitment and the health status in community-dwelling adults with a predefined risk of falling.

Seniors with a risk of falling were equipped with either an accelerometer or an accelerometer with an additional visual and optical fall detection system in a sub-group of the study population for a period of eight weeks. Pre- and post-study questionnaires were used to assess attitudes and acceptance toward technology.

In total, 14 subjects with a mean age of 75.1 years completed the study. Acceptance toward all sensors was high and subjects were confident in their ability to handle technology. Medical assessments showed only very mild physical and no mental impairments. Measures that assured subjects privacy protection were welcomed. Sensor technology should be as unobtrusive as possible.

Privacy protection and uncomplicated use of the fall detection equipment led to high acceptance in seniors with high-technical commitment and good health status. Issues to further improve acceptance could be identified. Future research on different populations is necessary.

I begin by examining some ways in which organisations have attempted to improve their recruitment and selection procedures to minimise bias and unfair discrimination, and focus on the assessment centre as a potentially useful technique in this respect, especially for managerial selection. I go on to examine the assessment centre in more detail, including its origins, construction and uses, before discussing the strong evidence for its validity as a selection and assessment procedure. I then describe some recent British innovations in assessment centre design and practice, especially in its use for management and organisation development purposes, before discussing some of my own recent research, in collaboration with Ivan Robertson and Usha Rout, on participants' attitudes towards the use of assessment centres for selection and development purposes, including gender differences in attitudes.

Given that planned marketing strategies and observable behaviors often are contingent on buyer and third‐party (e.g. competitor) responses, deep understanding and descriptions of the thoughts and actions of marketers need to reflect the dynamic interplay of such contingencies. The same view applies to planned organizational buying strategies and observable behaviors: buying behavior adapts through time based on information learned and marketers’ responses to requests made by the customer organization. Consequently, a two‐way, or multiple‐party, approach to theory construction is useful in particular for mapping the “if‐then” responses of the marketer’s thoughts/actions linked with the if‐then responses of buyers’ thoughts/actions through several time periods. Using in‐depth interviews and case histories of one marketing organization and 28 buying organizations related to the office furniture industry, the article illustrates descriptive modeling of the contingency dynamics in the thoughts and actions across the multiple parties involved in marketing‐buying interactions.

This paper seeks to explore varied interrelated challenges and barriers experienced by immigrant seniors.

Senior immigrants representing diverse ethnicities (Chinese, Afro Caribbean, Former Yugoslavian, Spanish) described their challenges, support needs, and barriers to service access. Service providers and policy makers from organizations serving immigrant seniors were interviewed to elicit their views on barriers to access and appropriateness of services for immigrant seniors. Qualitative methods were employed to enhance understanding of meanings, perceptions, beliefs, values, and behaviors of immigrant seniors, and investigate sensitive issues experienced by vulnerable groups. The qualitative data were subjected to thematic content analysis.

Seniors reported financial and language difficulties, health problems, discrimination, family conflicts, and social isolation. Although most immigrant seniors appreciated the standard of living in Canada and the services provided to seniors, most believed that support received was inadequate. Seniors encountered systemic (e.g. government policies), institutional (e.g. culturally inappropriate programs), and personal (e.g. transportation, language problems) barriers to accessing social and health services. Service providers and policy makers faced high costs of programs, inadequate financial and human resources, inadequate information about needs of immigrant seniors, inadequate geographical coverage, and lack of inter‐sectoral collaboration.

The challenges experienced by immigrant seniors have implications for programs and policies and can inform the development of culturally sensitive and appropriate services.

The barriers encountered by service providers in assisting immigrant seniors point to the importance of inter‐sectoral coordination, cultural sensitivity training, and expansion of service providers' mandates.

This study revealed numerous unmet needs for successful acculturation of immigrant and refugee seniors in Canada. It also reveals that the most cogent and sustainable approach to close this chasm of support deficits, unattended challenges, and complex stressors is to implement a model that simultaneously addresses the three levels and use a multisectoral approach.