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 65
... inventions and innovations. What were the larger social, cultural, and economic settings of these clusterings? Which contextual features help to explain why transformative bursts of innovation occurred when and how they did and not in ...
... effect on lesser innovations that followed. Cumulatively, however, those lesser, later innovations often added indispensably to the success of the original inventions. It is a common error to regard inventions and innovations CHAPTER 1 4.
... inventions and innovations as more or less independent acts of origination. Although the record usually turns out on closer inspection to be marred by ambiguities, at least in principle the substance and timing of each of these ...
... invention and innovation within society at large but the emergence of protoindustrial and industrial technology. This ... inventions as a fundamental property of the system itself. Scope and Historical Acceleration of Technology Fernand ...
... inventions, innovations, and their applications. But that, too, cannot be understood as an isolated, autonomous development. It is largely a reflect ion of the transformative powers of modern capitalism in its current, globally ...
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 |