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Although measures of physical function such as walking speed and time to complete chair-rises are highly heritable, the genetic architecture underlying these phenotypes remains poorly defined. To identify potentially novel genes and pathways underlying physical performance in older adults, we conducted a genome-wide association meta-analysis of the short physical performance battery (SPPB) (Score 0-12) and one of its components, chair-rise time (seconds) in 24,033 Caucasian adults aged 60+ from 13 cohorts (mean cohort age 66.2 ± 5.3 to 84.3 ± 4.1 years; 56.5% women). Cohorts had a genome wide scan imputed to either the Haplotype Reference Consortium or Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine imputation panels. Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) with a minor allele frequency ≥0.1% and imputation quality score ≥0.7 were included (range 7.5-10.5 million per cohort). Analyses were adjusted for age, sex, height, and population substructure. Meta-analysis was performed using a fixed-effects model. Although no genome-wide significant loci were identified, 67 and 60 suggestive loci (p< 5*10-5) were detected for SPPB score and chair-rises time, respectively. Pathway-based analyses indicated significant enrichment of genes affecting negative regulation of calcium channel activity (Bonferroni corrected p-value < 0.05). Sex-stratified gene-based analyses identified clathrin vesicle-associated sec14 protein 1 (CLVS1), significantly associated with chair-rise time in women (p= -1.5*10-7). CLVS1 is highly expressed in the cerebellum, which is involved in postural and motor function control. A larger sample size is needed to confirm and extend our findings, but our results potentially implicate a novel pathway and locus for physical performance in older women.

Over the last 25 years, municipal governments responded to an environment of increasing health care costs by implementing workplace wellness programs. Research reveals that workplace wellness programs can produce performance benefits ranging from reduced health care costs to productivity improvements. However, there is no systematic study of local government wellness programs that identifies the practices that produce cost reductions and productivity improvements. This article presents the results of a national survey of wellness programs in U.S. municipalities. We develop an index of program success using performance data from our sample. Statistical analysis reveals that targeted investments and performance monitoring, at both the individual and program level, serve to reduce costs and improve employee productivity. This research, thus, provides evidence for best practices in local government wellness programs. Given the array of potential benefits of wellness programs and the locus of employers in the provision of health care benefits, it is necessary to further investigate wellness programs in U.S. local governments.

At first glance, readers of Professors Newman, Guy, and Mastracci’s article may conclude that emotional labor and affective leadership are obvious qualities that we should expect from adults in the workplace. It seems that effective employees and managers have always shown strengths in these competencies. Is this another academic effort to explore an area that practitioners already understand and manage fairly well? Further reflection reveals, however, that taking emotional labor and affective leadership for granted can lead to dire consequences. Failure to empathize and manage emotions during citizen contact events can create costs in money and, in the most severe cases, costs in lives. A lack of appreciation for affective leadership can produce productivity and morale problems that, again, create costs for all involved.

According to its proponents, the Balanced Scorecard has the ability to improve performance and enhance accountability. After discussing domestic and foreign use of the Balanced Scorecard in government agencies in developed countries, this article explores the applicability of the model to government organizations in developing countries. Although an advanced method such as the BSC may be able to facilitate improvement, implementation of the method by countries facing so many concurrent challenges would be difficult due to a lack of resources, politicization of public administration, and corruption.

This article serves as the introduction to a special issue on natural disasters and public works management and policy. The authors note that large-scale natural disasters provide the occasion for public attention turning to the public works infrastructure, as basic necessities for living in a modern society are threatened or interrupted. The recent experience with Hurricane Katrina in the southern United States showed that without the critical infrastructure of water, electricity, and roadways, the most technologically advanced nation can quickly appear to be little different than the least developed countries in the world. The authors consider the concept of resilience as it applies to public works management and policies, then discuss the idea of infrastructure as it refers to not only the physical plant but also the human systems that are required to support the communication, coordination, and cooperation required to handle a disaster. This introductory article concludes with a brief description of each of the five related articles presented in the special issue. They note that the five articles contained in this issue stress the importance of a well-maintained and adequate infrastructure, whether it is the levee system, the communications system, or buildings. Careful planning for disasters and effective leadership during and after them are essential for localities to recover as quickly as possible.

This paper examines terrorist “fluids” as complex adaptive systems. The principles of agent-based modeling are applied to global terrorism as a basis for developing agent-based models of terrorist behavior. Recommendations for agent-based models of terrorist behavior as policy analytic tools are presented.

Books reviewed in this article: Richard P. Nathan, So You Want to Be in Government? Handbook for Appointed Officials in America's Governments Kenneth H. Ashworth, Caught between the Dog and the Fireplug, or, How to Survive Public Service O.C. McSwite, Invitation to Public Administration

Socio-techno-cultural reality, in the current historical era, evolves at a faster rate than do human brain or human institutions. This reality creates a “complexity gap” that reduces human and institutional capacities to adapt to the challenges of late modernity. New insights from the neurosciences may help to reduce the complexity gap. This paper argues that an extension of the period of human nurturance is one element that may serve to reduce the complexity gap. The argument herein is a synthesis of a variety of literatures that serve to support the notion of rethinking how long humans must be nurtured and educated.

Previous public administration research has failed to systematically explore the relationships between changing techno-economic paradigms and reform in American public administration. This article examines the linkages between bureaucratic reform and long-wave economic cycles. Specifically, the authors contend that the techno-economic paradigms that drive economic long waves are consistent with a pattern of initiation and eventually confirmation of reforms in public administration. The authors show that public administration reforms emerge during price downswings and are then followed by a period of “reform confirmation” during price upswings. The historical pattern of the approximately 50- to 60-year long-wave cycles reveals 25- to 30-year periods of downswing reform emergence followed by similar periods of price upswing reform confirmation. Finally, this article enhances our knowledge concerning the variables necessary to develop comprehensive theories of public administration reform.

Forty years ago, Herbert Simon reminded public managers of the limits of rationality, or the bounded rationality, of the individual decision maker. New analytical techniques from the sciences of complexity now provide a means to measure the complexity in the environment of public managers using actual organizational data. Time series analysis is used to examine data from the external environment of two urban police divisions. Results of the analysis reveal that the complexities of the environment of public organizations may serve as an inhibition to rational decision making that extends beyond the limits of the individual proposed by Simon.

Contemporary knowledge work places create tremendous challenges for employees and managers. High levels of “cognitive capital” are required to cope with the rapidly evolving complexity of work. This chapter presents an agent-based model of the dynamics of cognitive capital in a simulated workplace. Factors such as stress, sleep insufficiency, and excessive work function to reduce the cognitive capital among workers. The cognitive capital in this microworld is tracked among agents suffering from stress, sleep insufficiency and excessive work. The authors also explore how cognitive capital changes under varying cognitive enrichment scenarios. Simulation results reveal a range of behaviors typical of complex systems, showing evidence of periods of both stability and instability. The authors also see symmetry breaking behavior as the dynamics of cognitive capital create drastic change.

The paper presents a platform for marketing theory development and programmatic research. This platform fits marketing into a universal and evolutionary exchange paradigm that integrates human exchange with that of other living and nonliving systems. Importantly, it is shown how marketing exchange is itself a part of evolving exchange systems that are commonly discussed in the natural sciences. It is proposed that exchange systems, at all levels, evolve as part of a definable pattern. The integration of marketing exchange with exchange in all natural systems may afford a means for enhancing both the study and practice of marketing.

From the rise of Social Darwinism in the 19th century to the behavioral revolution in the 20th century, social scientists have looked to both theory and method from the natural sciences to understand the dynamics of change in social systems. Paul Higgins’ chapter ‘Climate Change: Complexity, Chaos and Order’ offers insights from chaos theory and the complexity sciences as means for better understanding change in social systems. These insights have been and, in fact, continue to be applied to our understanding of social systems change (see Jantsch, 1980; Anderson and Pines, 1988; Kiel and Elliott, 1996; Eve et al, 1997).

To evaluate the effect of nine disabling medical conditions upon recovery from functional limitations by elders.Retrospective analysis of prospective longitudinal cohort.Community.Persons aged 65 and older in Framingham Heart Study.Change in function in elders from biennial Examinations 18 (1983-85; baseline) through 23 (1994-96). At each examination, subjects reported limitations in heavy household work, walking up and down stairs, walking half a mile, bathing, toileting, and continence. They were also directly observed for performance of transferring in and out of a chair, dressing, walking 50 feet, and carrying a 10-pound object 10 feet. The prevalence of functional limitations and the incidence of recovery from functional limitation by the subsequent examination for each task were calculated. The effects of congestive heart failure, cognitive impairment, diabetes mellitus, stroke, depressive symptoms, hip fracture, knee pain, claudication, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease were evaluated. The relationship between the total number of comorbid conditions present (0, 1, 2, 3 or more), the presence of each individual condition at the start of each examination cycle, and the incidence of recovery from functional limitations were examined using generalized estimating equations.One thousand eight hundred twenty-five subjects were studied at baseline; 1,026 were available 10 years later. Mean age of subjects at baseline was 73.5 (range 61-95); 60.7% were women. The prevalence of functional limitations ranged from 3.1% to 29.8% at biennial Examination 18 and increased to 15.1% to 32.4% at Examination 23. The incidence of recovery ranged from 3.2% to 78.4% depending upon the task and the examination cycle. Increasing disease burden, as measured by the number of comorbidities, was associated with a decreased likelihood of recovery from functional limitations. Diabetes mellitus, stroke, depressive symptoms, hip fracture, and knee pain had the strongest adverse effect upon recovery from functional limitations.In these community-dwelling elders, recovery from prevalent functional limitations was frequent. Increasing disease burden was associated with a decreased incidence of recovery. Diabetes mellitus, stroke, depressive symptoms, hip fracture, and knee pain had the strongest adverse effect on recovery from functional limitations.

Perhaps the most difficult challenge in understanding social phenomena is their intractably complex nature. For much of the 20th century social scientists attempted to unravel the complexities of the social realm by emulating the methodologies of the natural sciences. Although these approaches enhanced social science research, they have fallen short of capturing emergent behavior and self-organization. For some years now, new approaches to the study of complex adaptive systems have offered researchers in both the physical and social sciences an important new theoretical and methodological framework for helping to understand a variety of nonlinear, dynamic systems. Complex adaptive systems are characterized often by “agents” interacting or capable of interacting with each other in dynamic, often nonlinear and surprising ways. Most social phenomena would readily fit the description of a complex adaptive system. The difficulty researchers have faced, given the opaque character of social processes, is to develop methodologies appropriate for better exploring such complex adaptive systems. A growing number of social scientists, dissatisfied with traditional methodologies, are seeking new methods for exploring the complexities of social dynamics. One of the emerging developments is the use of agent-based modeling and simulation to examine how social phenomena …

Agent-based modeling enhances our capacity to model competitive and cooperative behaviors at both the individual and group levels of analysis. Models presented in these proceedings produce consistent results regarding the relative fragility of cooperative regimes among agents operating under diverse rules. These studies also show how competition and cooperation may generate change at both the group and societal level. Agent-based simulation of competitive and cooperative behaviors may reveal the greatest payoff to social science research of all agent-based modeling efforts because of the need to better understand the dynamics of these behaviors in an increasingly interconnected world.

This package, directed at practicing managers, uses the computer to maintain and organize the information necessary for implementing the "one minute" approach to management popularized by Blanchard and Lorber in Putting the One Minute Manager to Work (William Morrow, 1985). It allows managers to track individual employee and workteam goal attainment. Proper use of this package is expected to improve management of employee behavior and enhance employee motivation, resulting in increased productivity.