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. |
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... improvements to the few in every historic epoch that have ultimately proved to be of decisive importance. In most of these latter instances, the greatest breaks in continuity occurred at the outset of closely related clusters or series ...
... improvements. Characteristically, these tended to be more far-reaching in their cumulative effect than was apparent at the time of their initial introduction. Given the informality of the process, records of those later improvements ...
... improvement: “knowledge of how to fulfillcertain human purposes in a specifiableand reproducible way . . . something that ... improvements might bring gains in efficiencyand yield, or reductions in cost, but wider, systemic effects were ...
... improvements in even the most habitual practices.26 But in this view, little is left of earlier technological change but dissociated processes and devices, each undergoing marginal changes and improvements in response to isolated needs ...
... improvement. Highly organized, essentially permanent research and development (hereafter R & D) efforts were limited to only a handful of firmsand industries a few decades ago. Now they have become common as the need to maintain 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 |