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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... naturally arose involved how directions of research are set, sustained, and changed. Another focused on the linkages between science and society—with technology firstamong them. As such, it may be reasonable to think of this essay in ...
... naturally embedded within encircling, successively larger and more diffuse cultural systems and their attendant patterns of meanings. Inherent in the subject of technology is a tendency to concretize and reify, to take for granted that ...
... natural environment—all of these are thrown into the melting pot whenever an artifact is designed or built. . . . They might have been otherwise.16 Many other factors, however, are functionally unrelated and essentially external in ...
... natural and unproblematical the corresponding 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 ...
... natural that clusterings of subsidiary improvements and applications quickly follow the more fruitful and fundamental breakthroughs as their potential is recognized and widely exploited. At the same time, the heterogeneity of ...
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 |