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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... growth and change. Second, most anthropologists tend to maintain a consistently integrative, contextual emphasis. In order to understand specificpaths of change and continuity, the idea of context directs us toward an inductive, broadly ...
... growth that is required in the basic, enabling supply of technological innovations. Similarly, F. M. Scherer, invoking the earlier judgment of Joseph Schumpeter, argues that greater weight of responsibility for growth should be assigned ...
... or merely leisure. Population growth has no doubt been another alternative outcome of improved productive efficiency. Especially under conditions of uncertainty, larger family units heightened security not only for families as CHAPTER 1 16.
... growth, saturation, and senescence phases of different subcomponents seldom coincide and have become increasingly difficultto predict.30 At both a global and a national scale, we are encountering an increasingly unifiedscience-and ...
... growth. By creating new opportunities for profit,they encouraged an inflow of entrepreneurial talent and capital investment and a consequent growth of new industries. This generally led to intensifiedcompetition, he believed, and for a ...
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 |