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 49
... results. It is just such a concern for patterning that has provided the stimulus for this study—the recognition that major technological advances have frequently been composed of waves or clusterings of sometimes seemingly unrelated ...
... results, becomes more and more misleading as we approach modern times. Formal definitions, if they are to be helpful at all across a broad span of centuries that reaches into the present, need to consider the creative, purposive ...
... resulting from many new paths of convergence with basic scientificresearch. What has been put in place is nothing less than a systematic process to generate an accelerating flow of new inventions, innovations, and their applications ...
... result of the confluence of other institutional forces are now a subject of increasing scholarly scrutiny. From an opposite direction, price-setting markets can be identifiedin early modern England in which buyers and sellers ...
... result of Schumpeter's stimulus, it is common today to differentiate between the two. The term invention is reserved for genuinely original acts of discovery, occurring under circumstances that are largely outside of and immune from ...
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 |