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 53
... capital flows, facilitated by electronic transactions through offshore financialmarkets that largely evade control by national economic authorities. And with these developments has come “the accelerated homogenisation of consumer ...
... capital investment and a consequent growth of new industries. This generally led to intensifiedcompetition, he believed, and for a time secondary innovations would sustain the momentum. Presently, however, an exhaustion of even the ...
... capital. The entrepreneur may also be a capitalist, of course, but the assumption of risk is not essential; “qua entrepreneur he loses other people's money.”36 Far from accepting consumer preferences as a given, in the manner of ...
... capital investment and hence the pace of industrialization.44 A considerable degree of linkage between innovative technologies and changing structural features of the society and economy certainly emerges as plausible from this account ...
... capital improvements. The greatly enhanced efficiencyof water wheels resulting from John Smeaton's technical studies in the eighteenth century, for example, no doubt substantially slowed their replacement by steam engines as a source of ...
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 |