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 76
... introducing an additional layer of risks and opportunities is the fact that large areas of international competition now are no longer subject to the primary constraints of national frontiers. Like corporate ownership itself, corporate ...
... introduction also modifiedprior contexts of design and use. Yet the process of innovating and deploying new technologies has not ordinarily been as narrowly pragmatic as this suggests. Evident for at least several centuries, firstin ...
... introduction. Given the informality of the process, records of those later improvements tend to be poor, incomplete, self-serving, or altogether lacking. In not a few cases information was purposely left unrecorded and even shrouded in ...
... introducing them are not independent scientists or engineers but entrepreneurs and teams working under their immediate directions. Unlike inventions, which tend to focus on a central discovery, Schumpeter recognized that innovations may ...
... introduced improvements.34 There is seldom a clear, let alone predictable, line of derivation leading from an invention to the innovations later associated with it. Inventions are usually generated in a controlled environment ...
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 |