Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry into Western TechnologyPrinceton University Press, 2012 M09 17 - 360 páginas Technology, perhaps the most salient feature of our time, affects everything from jobs to international law yet ranks among the most unpredictable facets of human life. Here Robert McC. Adams, renowned anthropologist and Secretary Emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution, builds a new approach to understanding the circumstances that drive technological change, stressing its episodic, irregular nature. The result is nothing less than a sweeping history of technological transformation from ancient times until now. Rare in antiquity, the bursts of innovations that mark the advance of technology have gradually accelerated and now have become an almost continuous feature of our culture. Repeatedly shifting in direction, this path has been shaped by a host of interacting social, cultural, and scientific forces rather than any deterministic logic. Thus future technological developments, Adams maintains, are predictable only over the very short term. |
Dentro del libro
Resultados 1-5 de 55
... Basic/Applied Research Funding by Selected Federal Agencies R & D Expenditures by U.S. Manufacturers, 1958–1990 Earned Doctoral Degrees by Field and Percentage of Women, 1960–1991 Percentage of U.S. Doctorates Earned by Noncitizens ...
... basic understanding of nature simultaneously feed upon new technological capabilities and are quickly translated into them. Novel industrial processes and products explode the fieldof perceived needs and preferences. Markets ...
... basic research, have over the last century or so come to play in intellectual life. But the consequence is, in any case, that for a deeper, less derivative understanding, technology demands a distinctive approach of its own. Science ...
... basic scientificresearch. What has been put in place is nothing less than a systematic process to generate an accelerating flow of new inventions, innovations, and their applications. But that, too, cannot be understood as an isolated ...
... basic, enabling supply of technological innovations. Similarly, F. M. Scherer, invoking the earlier judgment of Joseph Schumpeter, argues that greater weight of responsibility for growth should be assigned to entrepreneurs than to ...
Contenido
3 | |
36 | |
3 Technology and the New European Society | 69 |
4 England as the Workshop of the World | 104 |
The American System Emerges | 138 |
6 The United States Succeeds to Industrial Leadership | 173 |
7 The Competitive Global System | 212 |
Technological Change in a Borderless World | 253 |
Notes | 279 |
References Cited | 301 |
Index | 327 |
Otras ediciones - Ver todas
Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry into Western Technology Robert M. Adams Vista previa limitada - 2012 |
Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry Into Western Technology Robert McCormick Adams Sin vista previa disponible - 1996 |