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 80
... Sources as Percentage of Aggregate Consumption Aggregate Miles of Railroad Trackage American Agricultural Exports, 1867–1901 U.S. R & D by Performing Sector and Fund Source, 1960–1993 Basic/Applied Research Funding by Selected Federal ...
... sources, this book primarily embodies the reflect ions of an anthropologist, an apparent interloper from a discipline prevailingly uninvolved with issues of modern technology. However broad the hunting license of a fieldof inquiry that ...
... source of a given technical process or contrivance, and larger patterns of similarity or divergence that might illuminate such discoveries. Even if the search for explanations of single contributions often proves discouraging, a survey ...
... source of jobs and wealth. Not overlooked, but somehow casting a shadow that only heightened the image of power, was the all-too-evident side effect of a surrounding, chronically depressed neighborhood that seemed to slide deeper into ...
... sources of novelty to be found in spontaneous modifications of practical routines, in the pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunity, or in spinoffs from science and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge? Why do institutions, firms,and ...
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 |