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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... role for government monitoring and regulation, which necessarily constrains, and sometimes can distort, the range of techno-economic choices? Difference in the timing of risks and rewards is often a crucial consideration. As a society ...
... role of technology in history been primarily that of a dependent or independent variable—dr iven or driver? Only by large-scale comparison, beginning in the ancient world and progressing to the modern, could these questions reasonably ...
... role of the firm. Major, long-lived corporations may have surviving archives and so escape the difficulty. But smaller undertakings, in many cases the principal seedbeds of technological innovation and experimentation, have universally ...
... role of potential users, consumers, or investors. Frequently, their suggestions or demands contributed substantially to the process of innovation by envisioning needed features and stimulating the search for them.2 Hence it is a ...
... role in some respects reminiscent of that of genetic mutations in biology. But they differ in a number of important ways. First, they are decidedly less random, more situationally responsive or context-dependent, more prone to occur in ...
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 |