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 83
... contributions from other directions. Further perspectives are provided by corporate strategists and makers and critics of federal policies for technology. Although I have tried to draw judiciously upon all these sources, this book ...
... contributions often proves discouraging, a survey of larger patterns may have more rewarding results. It is just such a concern for patterning that has provided the stimulus for this study—the recognition that major technological ...
... contributions of a more technological character—those of early craftspeople, laboratory technicians, machine builders and instrument makers, designers, and later those of engineers—ha ve not been adequately credited for their importance ...
... contributed substantially to the process of innovation by envisioning needed features and stimulating the search for them.2 ... contributions have fallen within a broad, temporally unfolding front of complementary efforts involving many ...
... contributed to specificsequences of change. The fieldof analysis is subject to radical, continuing adjustment, from a particular craft workshop or factory floor to the competitive interactions of an entire industry, and thence 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 |