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
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... costs. More often than not, unforeseen areas of improved efficacy or widened application are later found that heighten these prospects further and take them in entirely new directions. But at what risk, and to whom? Advancing technology ...
... cost considerations. In search of lowered costs or higher productivity, locational mobility has become a key to corporate survival, but with potentially devastating local effects. All in all, ongoing technological change presents us ...
... costs and availability; orientations toward tradition and novelty; tolerance for risk and uncertainty; and, of course, residual values as well as more dynamic religious callings. Separately or in combination, we must be sensitive to the ...
... cost, but wider, systemic effects were otherwise limited. But Brooks offers a modern contrast, whereby with computers and communications systems, “n ot only the software, but also the organization that goes with the system, are ...
... cost effects of the diffusion of a new technology implies that small initial advantages or disadvantages . . . can cumulate readily into large advantages or disadvantages in comparison with alternative technologies. A particular product ...
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 |