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
... force. Pollution and the destruction of environmental resources and amenities provide preeminent examples. Still, it must be noted that technological advances themselves, too easily identifiedas the active forces of change, are in ...
... forces. And it is the socioeconomic forces rather than spontaneous technological developments that tend to be primary and determinative. Apart from occasional, limited, and contingent episodes of apparent technological “momentum”—“sites ...
... forces and uncertainties from many directions, many of them unexpected. A few individual inventors like Thomas A. Edison may have almost singlehandedly stimulated the technology of their times and set its course for years to come. Far ...
... forces that at least may tend to induce some regularity of process. But there are also some that are short term and localized—“ flashes of insight, happy accidents, vagaries of financing,chance meetings, and a host of other events of a ...
... force.20 More recently, Giovanni Dosi and his collaborators apparently attempt to straddle the issue. While acknowledging the “coupled dynamics . . . between technology and other social and economic variables,” their formulation of the ...
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 |