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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... scales as tools of inquiry. That accounts especially for the very long-time perspective that I have taken—one that begins with Near Eastern antiquity, at the point of origin of the urban institutions on which modern technological ...
... scale comparison, beginning in the ancient world and progressing to the modern, could these questions reasonably be addressed. My own growing interest in these questions coincided with declining opportunities to pursue them in ...
... scale and scope of their consequences. No less important, they do not adhere strictly to their finder or creator, but are shared, at least to some extent. In many cases the sharing is intentional, in others despite efforts to keep ...
... scale, methods, organization, and ultimately the propensity to generate new inventions as a fundamental property of the system itself. Scope and Historical Acceleration of Technology Fernand Braudel has written CHAPTER 1 10.
... scale. . . . Today, managerial innovations are becoming an increasingly important aspect of technology. . . . Management, insofar as it can be described by fully specifiablerules, is thus a technology, and indeed every large ...
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 |