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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... practical routines, in the pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunity, or in spinoffs from science and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge? Why do institutions, firms,and individuals—or these two nations at different periods in their ...
... practical possibility. Until the passage of the series of Married Women's Property Acts toward the end of the nineteenth century (in both England and the United States), patents would automatically become the property of the husband. It ...
... practical alternative, or even the most economically advantageous one. They challenge, in short, “the prevailing sense of . . . individual omniscience and self-conscious historical missions,” and “ar gue instead that . . . social ...
... practical relevance and powers, its capabilities to contribute directly to the fulfillmentof economic goals on the basis of new understandings of fundamental principles. Those capabilities must be understood not as a constant attribute ...
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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 |