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 55
... fact that large areas of international competition now are no longer subject to the primary constraints of national frontiers. Like corporate ownership itself, corporate strategies rest on extensive networks of marketing and licensing ...
... is hopeless to storm, by a frontal attack, the great citadels of causality underlying highly complex groups of facts.”3 But the difficulty is, of course, that flanking movements seldom encounter easy going and instead PREFACE xiv.
... facts and material objects. There is indeed a place for an essentialist approach of this sort, especially when, as in this book, it is intended that a wide-ranging reconnaissance of surface topography will encourage later plowing to ...
... fact that, within these larger technological ensembles, the experimentation, growth, saturation, and senescence phases of different subcomponents seldom coincide and have become increasingly difficultto predict.30 At both a global and a ...
... fact.”40 Longer-run regularities are strongly argued by some, and there is considerable, if debatable, evidence in support of them. More debatable still is the proposition that they exhibit a regular periodicity of about a half-century ...
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 |