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We examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the functioning of university students with disabilities using assistant support services in Poland. The study aims to (1) reveal the role existing university-based assistant services play in students' lives and (2) examine the impact of the pandemic on assistant services by students with disabilities.

We gathered and analyzed 25 interviews with students with disabilities from across Poland, from public and nonpublic higher education institutions.

The assistant support service at universities introduced in Poland proved to be fragmentary and limited only to the educational process, which resulted in the exclusion of people with complex disabilities and those requiring support in self-care activities. The pandemic has exacerbated previously observed dimensions of segregation and inequalities leading to disproportionate isolation of students with disabilities. It also highlighted the limited understanding of personal assistantship functioning in the academic context and the need for urgent development of universal access to assistance services across Poland. At the same time the forced move to distant, internet-based learning, at least for some students, gave them a sense of self-reliance and independence.

This research adds to the understanding of the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for students with disabilities in the case of Poland. It also calls for a reexamination of what personal assistance should mean in the context of higher education and beyond.

The purpose of this paper is to show that a business incubation/incubator program is an enterprise development strategy, aimed at accelerating the process of formation, development, survivability and growth of new enterprises by providing those new enterprises (clients) with a wide range of business assistance including physical facilities, business counselling and networking. This paper presents results of a research conducted to investigate the level of satisfaction/dissatisfaction of the clients with the provision of those assistance services.

In this paper the level of clients' satisfaction/dissatisfaction with a service is calculated using a proposed framework in terms of the mean difference between the importance of the service and the effectiveness of incubator management in providing the respective service as perceived by the clients.

The results in this paper indicate that clients were generally more satisfied with facility related services than the counselling and business networking assistances services. However, there are significant differences between the perceived importance attached to a number of facility related services and the effectiveness of those services, suggesting a variation of the level of clients' satisfaction.

These findings have important implications for the management of business incubation programs, which are highlighted in this paper.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the types of business consulting services most needed by small business owners and entrepreneurs and to examine the role that gender and ethnicity plays in the demand for specialized assistance.

A survey was administered to small business owners and entrepreneurs to rate their interest in specialized consulting services. The consulting assistance was divided into strategic, operating and administrative categories based on the framework of Chrisman and Leslie.

Overall, the type of consulting with the highest interest was in the area of operations assistance, followed by strategic assistance and administrative assistance. Although few differences were found between male and female respondents, there were significant differences in the needs of minority women.

This study demonstrates the need for further research on minority female small business owners and entrepreneurs. In particular, it suggests further investigation of services that could be made available to them.

The results indicate that programs designed to assist minority women might have the greatest potential impact. Specialized attention may be necessary to assist this demographic segment, particularly since prior research indicates that minorities often start with greater resource limitations. Public policies should continue to encourage progress by helping establish a new generation of minority entrepreneurs.

The findings from this study provided current evidence of the specialized needs of minority entrepreneurs. It is important to distinguish the needs of entrepreneurs in today's marketplace, in order to develop the most effective and impactful small business assistance programs.

The United States’ National Center on Advancing Person-Centered Practices and Systems provides technical assistance to human service systems on person-centered thinking, planning and practices. To apply for the Center's technical assistance, 33 state human service systems submitted applications and participated in interviews in which they detailed technical assistance needs. This technical paper examines themes that emerged from these technical assistance applications and interviews. These themes offer a view into barriers, obstacles and priorities for human service systems as they work toward more person-centered practices. Common themes point to key areas that, if enhanced, could result in a more person-centered system overall.

The application process generated 33 applications containing technical assistance goals and priorities, summaries of recent and ongoing initiatives to advance person-centered approaches, measurement methods and anticipated challenges. Using thematic analysis, the authors organized the information into seven themes.

Applicants identified seven themes to improve person-centered thinking, planning and practices: Staff Training and Competencies, Participant Engagement, Measurement and Quality Improvement, Cross-System Consistency in Planning and Practice, Payment and Managed Care, Cultural and Linguistic Responsiveness and Other Practice-Related Goals. They also articulated contextual factors that help or hinder systems efforts and a vision for an ideal person-centered system.

The themes provide a unique window into human service system administrators' priorities for achieving more person-centered human service systems and the conditions that may promote or hinder systems change.

The development of self-service technologies, while intended to better serve customers by offering them autonomy, has created situations in which individuals may require additional help. The purpose of this paper is to explore perceptions of chat as an assistance channel, to identify its perceived role in a customer service environment.

In all, 23 semi-structured interviews held with both chat and non-chat users assessed perceptions of chat in an assistance encounter. A thematic analysis was used.

The findings highlight a paradoxical perception of chat in a customer assistance context. On the one hand, customers perceive live chat as mainly beneficial in a customer service context, alleviating embarrassment, perceived threats and potential dissatisfaction linked to assistance requests. On the other hand, the elusive nature of a chat conversation interlocutor (human or artificial) adversely affects how customers interpret assistance from companies.

This research underscores the perceived threats of assistance encounters and shows the ambivalent role of chat in such a context. It also highlights chat’s specific features that make it a relevant medium for assistance requests.

This study helps companies better understand customers’ perceptions of assistance requests and chat in that context. Companies can use the findings to develop better ways to address assistance needs and offer transparent and fully personalized human chat to provide an inclusive service.

This paper highlights the ambivalent role of chat as an assistance channel, easing assistance requests but also entailing a potential negative spillover effect, when negative chat perceptions of an artificial interlocutor have consequences.

Until recently, little research has been directed at the measurement of the impact of governmental support on the firm. The major focus of this article is on the methodological and measurement issues that appear to have a confounding effect and may account for broad equivocality of the findings in many of the studies. An evaluation paradigm is developed and applied to the research reviewed. The article concludes with a synthesis of the issues and provides specific directions for future research.

The aging population in the United States makes skill in marketing to the mature consumer increasingly important. The biophysical and psychosocial aging process creates a need for specific strategies to address the changes brought on by age. Attempts to ascertain the degree to which the financial services industry recognizes some of the needs of the elderly market and the degree to which marketing programs are addressing these needs. The results show that financial services marketers have been slow in implementing strategies which might help them better attract and serve the mature consumer, when compared with other industries. While this industry has done an excellent job in developing products which appeal to older consumers, they appear to be lacking in special assistance to mature consumers and training to support such assistance. Provides managerial implications stressing specific areas for improvement.

There is increasing recognition of the importance of dealing with material hardship rather than just income poverty. This paper deals with electricity disconnection and shows how Electricité de France (EDF), the French monopoly provider of electricity, has been testing a number of new policy instruments to avoid disconnection among its low income residential customers. EDF’s approach is grounded in marketing principles and techniques both in terms of its willingness to respond to French public opinion on the need to reduce poverty and hardship, and in terms of its use of poor customers surveys to analyze the satisfaction of this segment of clientele to its energy assistance programs. EDF’s programmes show how utilities, both public and private, can go beyond financial assistance as represented by the LIHEAP energy voucher programme in the USA.

The scope of the participation of civil society organizations (CSOs) in providing public services as well as the models and formats of implementing State–CSO partnerships have varied both in sectorial terms and from a historical perspective. The discussion on State–CSO partnerships in service delivery has recently produced many studies, especially related to public management reform agenda, although many ideas based on public governance have appeared in recent years within the Brazilian context. This study features a historical analysis of the State–CSO partnerships in three different areas: AIDS, social assistance, and culture, and seeks to identify the main characteristics of each management model (bureaucratic, managerial, and new public governance), based on an analysis of sectorial norms produced by the federal government to regulate these relationships.