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 43
... possible expense of methodological parsimony, this account will seek to avoid drawing any line around the set of social features that are viewed as systemically linked to technology and relevant to understanding its many paths of growth ...
... possible intervention, I turned to a more active engagement in academic and scientificproblems of organization. Both at the University of Chicago and in the National Academy of Sciences–National Research Council complex, one new group ...
... possible by other innovations being already in place. . . . In short, technologies form a highly interconnected web . . . a network.”28 It is also important to recognize how closely we have come to associate technological advance with ...
... possible originally. “But all these required further subsystems, to monitor and control their performance when they ran into limitations.”39 A number of attempts have been made to provide a quantitative expression of the clustering of ...
... possible. Secondary effects rippled outward, stimulating, for example, the flow of capital investment and hence the pace of industrialization.44 A considerable degree of linkage between innovative technologies and changing structural ...
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 |