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 74
... earlier work was devoted to the unfolding sequence of urban life in southwestern Asia, from late prehistory to the threshold of the modern era. In shifting to a fresh and unfamiliar subject, I admittedly have had to rely heavily on ...
... earlier discoveries. And surely no less important than this technical heritage was the role of potential users, consumers, or investors. Frequently, their suggestions or demands contributed substantially to the process of innovation by ...
... earlier judgment of Joseph Schumpeter, argues that greater weight of responsibility for growth should be assigned to entrepreneurs than to inventors.19 On the other hand, no less forcefully, Simon Kuznets maintains the contrary emphasis ...
... earlier technological change but dissociated processes and devices, each undergoing marginal changes and improvements in response to isolated needs and rationales. Each becomes, in effect, a separate commodity, accepted or rejected on ...
... earlier sources. But also needing to be overcome may be the reluctance of modern scholars to recognize patterns of motivation different from the economically “rat ional,” individually acquisitive ones that capitalism has made so central ...
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 |