Download or read book Technological Determinism and Social Change written by Jan Servaes and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sheds light on the impact of new information and communication technologies on civil society by examining specific cases in Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, China, Columbia, Kenya, the Netherlands, and the United States.
Download or read book Does Technology Drive History written by Merritt Roe Smith and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1994-06-02 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These thirteen essays explore a crucial historical questionthat has been notoriously hard to pin down: To what extent,and by what means, does a society's technology determine itspolitical, social, economic, and cultural forms? These thirteen essays explore a crucial historical question that has been notoriously hard to pin down: To what extent, and by what means, does a society's technology determine its political, social, economic, and cultural forms? Karl Marx launched the modern debate on determinism with his provocative remark that "the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist," and a classic article by Robert Heilbroner (reprinted here) renewed the debate within the context of the history of technology. This book clarifies the debate and carries it forward.Marx's position has become embedded in our culture, in the form of constant reminders as to how our fast-changing technologies will alter our lives. Yet historians who have looked closely at where technologies really come from generally support the proposition that technologies are not autonomous but are social products, susceptible to democratic controls. The issue is crucial for democratic theory. These essays tackle it head-on, offering a deep look at all the shadings of determinism and assessing determinist models in a wide variety of historical contexts. Contributors Bruce Bimber, Richard W. Bulliet, Robert L. Heilbroner, Thomas P. Hughes, Leo Marx, Thomas J. Misa, Peter C. Perdue, Philip Scranton, Merritt Roe Smith, Michael L. Smith, John M. Staudenmaier, Rosalind Williams
Download or read book Beyond Innovation Technology Institution and Change as Categories for Social Analysis written by Thomas Kaiserfeld and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-07-07 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Innovation counter weighs the present innovation monomania by broadening our thinking about technological and institutional change. It is done by a multidisciplinary review of the most common ideas about the dynamics between technology and institutions.
Download or read book Social Theory after the Internet written by Ralph Schroeder and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2018-01-04 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The internet has fundamentally transformed society in the past 25 years, yet existing theories of mass or interpersonal communication do not work well in understanding a digital world. Nor has this understanding been helped by disciplinary specialization and a continual focus on the latest innovations. Ralph Schroeder takes a longer-term view, synthesizing perspectives and findings from various social science disciplines in four countries: the United States, Sweden, India and China. His comparison highlights, among other observations, that smartphones are in many respects more important than PC-based internet uses. Social Theory after the Internet focuses on everyday uses and effects of the internet, including information seeking and big data, and explains how the internet has gone beyond traditional media in, for example, enabling Donald Trump and Narendra Modi to come to power. Schroeder puts forward a sophisticated theory of the role of the internet, and how both technological and social forces shape its significance. He provides a sweeping and penetrating study, theoretically ambitious and at the same time always empirically grounded.The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of digital media and society, the internet and politics, and the social implications of big data.
Download or read book Rethinking Science Technology and Social Change written by Ralph Schroeder and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking Science, Technology, and Social Change challenges the prevailing notion that science and technology are constructed or socially shaped. The text puts forth a case for technological determinism, based on a realistic and pragmatic account of science and technology, informed by historical comparisons. Schroeder begins by exploring the social organization of scientific and technological advances; the intersecting trajectories of big science and technological systems; and the impact of science and technology on economic change. He goes on to discuss the social implications of technology, including the way that it affects politics and consumption. The book then rethinks traditional theories about the relationship between science, technology, and social change. The argument presented shifts the debate on topics such as the relationship between growth and sustainability, and thus has important policy implications. This book will be of great interest to scholars, scientists, and anyone interested in understanding how science and technology are transforming our world.
Download or read book The Social Construction of Technological Systems anniversary edition written by Wiebe E. Bijker and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-05-18 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anniversary edition of an influential book that introduced a groundbreaking approach to the study of science, technology, and society. This pioneering book, first published in 1987, launched the new field of social studies of technology. It introduced a method of inquiry—social construction of technology, or SCOT—that became a key part of the wider discipline of science and technology studies. The book helped the MIT Press shape its STS list and inspired the Inside Technology series. The thirteen essays in the book tell stories about such varied technologies as thirteenth-century galleys, eighteenth-century cooking stoves, and twentieth-century missile systems. Taken together, they affirm the fruitfulness of an approach to the study of technology that gives equal weight to technical, social, economic, and political questions, and they demonstrate the illuminating effects of the integration of empirics and theory. The approaches in this volume—collectively called SCOT (after the volume's title) have since broadened their scope, and twenty-five years after the publication of this book, it is difficult to think of a technology that has not been studied from a SCOT perspective and impossible to think of a technology that cannot be studied that way.
Download or read book The Social Shaping of Technology written by Donald A. MacKenzie and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technological change is often seen as something that follows its own logic -- something we may welcome, or about which we may protest, but which we are unable to alter fundamentally. This reader challenges that assumption and its distinguished contributors demonstrate that technology is affected at a fundamental level by the social context in which it develops. General arguments are introduced about the relation of technology to society and different types of technology are examined: the technology of production: domestic and reproductive technology; and military technology. The book draws on authors from Karl Marx to Cynthia Cockburn to show that production technology is shaped by social relations in the workplace. It moves on to the technologies of the household and biological reproduction, which are topics that male-dominated social science has tended to ignore or trivialise -- though these are actually of crucial significance where powerful shaping factors are at work, normally unnoticed. The final section asks what shapes the most frightening technology of all -- the technology of weaponry, especially nuclear weapons. The editors argue that social scientists have devoted disproportionate attention to the effects of technology on society, and tended to ignore the more fundamental question of what shapes technology in the first place. They have drawn both on established work in the history and sociology of technology and on newer feminist perspectives to show just how important and fruitful it is to try to answer that deeper question. The first edition of this reader, published in 1985, had a considerable influence on thinking about the relationship between technology andsociety. This second edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded to take into account new research and the emergence of new theoretical perspectives.
Download or read book Social Shaping Theory as a Derivative of Technological Determinism written by Arghya Ray and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2013-09-23 with total page 7 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientific Essay from the year 2010 in the subject Sociology - Economy and Industry, grade: A, , language: English, abstract: Technological determinism or TD can be described as a reductionist framework that can be used to explore the interrelations between humans and scientific technologies. However, several scholars like Dosi (1982) preferred to develop a broader perspective on technological determinism on the basis of more intricate analysis of technology change and innovation management. According to the scholars like Mackenzie and Wajcman (1999), a major drawback of technological determinism is its rigidity which is resulted by the deterministic nature of this theory. Such an approach, as advocated by its early proponents like Thorstein Veblen, restricts is suppleness to explain the complex attributes of different social processes especially in relationship with innovation management (Tilman 2004).
Download or read book The Social Shaping of Technology written by Donald A. MacKenzie and published by Milton Keynes ; Philadelphia : Open University Press. This book was released on 1985-01-01 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Between Reason and Experience written by Andrew Feenberg and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010-04-09 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading philosopher of technology calls for the democratic coordination of technical rationality with everyday experience. The technologies, markets, and administrations of today's knowledge society are in crisis. We face recurring disasters in every domain: climate change, energy shortages, economic meltdown. The system is broken, despite everything the technocrats claim to know about science, technology, and economics. These problems are exacerbated by the fact that today powerful technologies have unforeseen effects that disrupt everyday life; the new masters of technology are not restrained by the lessons of experience, and accelerate change to the point where society is in constant turmoil. In Between Reason and Experience, leading philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg makes a case for the interdependence of reason—scientific knowledge, technical rationality—and experience. Feenberg examines different aspects of the tangled relationship between technology and society from the perspective of critical theory of technology, an approach he has pioneered over the past twenty years. Feenberg points to two examples of democratic interventions into technology: the Internet (in which user initiative has influenced design) and the environmental movement (in which science coordinates with protest and policy). He examines methodological applications of critical theory of technology to the case of the French Minitel computing network and to the relationship between national culture and technology in Japan. Finally, Feenberg considers the philosophies of technology of Heidegger, Habermas, Latour, and Marcuse. The gradual extension of democracy into the technical sphere, Feenberg argues, is one of the great political transformations of our time.
Download or read book International Encyclopedia of Organization Studies written by Stewart Clegg and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2008 with total page 2009 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describing the field, spanning individual, organisation, societal and cultural perspectives in a cross-disciplinary manner, this is the premier reference tool for students, lecturers, academics and practitioners to gather knowledge about a range of important topics from the perspective of organisation studies.
Download or read book Media Technology and Society written by Brian Winston and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the popular myth of a present-day 'information revolution', Media Technology and Society is essential reading for anyone interested in the social impact of technological change. Winston argues that the development of new media forms, from the telegraph and the telephone to computers, satellite and virtual reality, is the product of a constant play-off between social necessity and suppression: the unwritten law by which new technologies are introduced into society only insofar as their disruptive potential is limited.
Download or read book Engineering as a Social Enterprise written by National Academy of Engineering and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1991-02-01 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is society influenced by engineering and technology? How in turn does society shape engineering and technology? This book from the National Academy of Engineering explores ways in which technology and society form inseparable elements in a complex sociotechnical system. The essays in this volume are based on the proposition that many forces move and shape engineering, technology, culture, and society. Six specialists both inside and outside the field of engineering offer views on how engineering responds to society's needs and how social forces shape what engineers do and what they can achieve.
Download or read book Technology Matters written by David E. Nye and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2007-08-24 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses in nontechnical language ten central questions about technology that illuminate what technology is and why it matters. Technology matters, writes David Nye, because it is inseparable from being human. We have used tools for more than 100,000 years, and their central purpose has not always been to provide necessities. People excel at using old tools to solve new problems and at inventing new tools for more elegant solutions to old tasks. Perhaps this is because we are intimate with devices and machines from an early age—as children, we play with technological toys: trucks, cars, stoves, telephones, model railroads, Playstations. Through these machines we imagine ourselves into a creative relationship with the world. As adults, we retain this technological playfulness with gadgets and appliances—Blackberries, cell phones, GPS navigation systems in our cars. We use technology to shape our world, yet we think little about the choices we are making. In Technology Matters, Nye tackles ten central questions about our relationship to technology, integrating a half-century of ideas about technology into ten cogent and concise chapters, with wide-ranging historical examples from many societies. He asks: Can we define technology? Does technology shape us, or do we shape it? Is technology inevitable or unpredictable? (Why do experts often fail to get it right?)? How do historians understand it? Are we using modern technology to create cultural uniformity, or diversity? To create abundance, or an ecological crisis? To destroy jobs or create new opportunities? Should "the market" choose our technologies? Do advanced technologies make us more secure, or escalate dangers? Does ubiquitous technology expand our mental horizons, or encapsulate us in artifice? These large questions may have no final answers yet, but we need to wrestle with them—to live them, so that we may, as Rilke puts it, "live along some distant day into the answers."
Download or read book Communication for Development and Social Change written by Jan Servaes and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with the processes required to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and effect positive developmental change. It is contextual and based on dialogue. The stakeholders' participation also needs to be promoted. This is essential in order to understand of their perceptions, perspectives, values, attitudes and practices so that these can be incorporated into the design and implementation of development initiatives. The book, for the most part, follows the two-way horizontal model of communication, but also makes use of the...
Download or read book The Real World of Technology written by Ursula Franklin and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 1999-06-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this expanded edition of her bestselling 1989 CBC Massey Lectures, renowned scientist and humanitarian Ursula M. Franklin examines the impact of technology upon our lives and addresses the extraordinary changes since The Real World of Technology was first published. In four new chapters, Franklin tackles contentious issues, such as the dilution of privacy and intellectual property rights, the impact of the current technology on government and governance, the shift from consumer capitalism to investment capitalism, and the influence of the Internet upon the craft of writing.
Download or read book Consumers in the Country written by Ronald R. Kline and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2000-04-28 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1900 to 1960, the introduction and development of four so-called urbanizing technologies–the telephone, automobile, radio, and electric light and power–transformed the rural United States. But did these new technologies revolutionize rural life in the ways modernizers predicted? And how exactly–and with what levels of resistance and acceptance–did this change take place? In Consumers in the Country Ronald R. Kline, avoiding the trap of technological determinism, explores the changing relationships among the Country Life professionals, government agencies, sales people, and others who promoted these technologies and the farm families who largely succeeded in adapting them to rural culture.
