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. |
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... consumers, or investors. Frequently, their suggestions or demands contributed substantially to the process of innovation by envisioning needed features and stimulating the search for them.2 Hence it is a reifying distortion to isolate ...
... consumer preference; military requirements, mercantilist strategies, and other manifestations of state intervention; markers of status gradations and routes of social mobility; resource costs and availability; orientations toward ...
... consumer preferences, product standards and production methods on a global scale”31 In short, modern technology has become an integral part—the essential part—of a worldwide complex of economic and institutional forces that is at once ...
... consumer preferences as a given, in the manner of neoclassical economics, Schumpeter boldly asserted that the entrepreneur could and should set out to create or re-direct these tastes as necessary. Tolerant of oligopoly as an ...
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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 |