Technological Change

As change goes, technology implementation is as big as it gets. Technology is a breathtaking investment. It often takes significant revenue and heck of a lot of work, devouring profitability, time, focus, and energy. Why do we do it? For the huge upsides: competitiveness, survival, domination, success. This book is for anyone whose neck is on the line to deliver. How do you make sure you deliver? The key is to get people to use technology correctly. Technology is a tool. If you can’t harness the power of the people in your organization to use that tool correctly, you’ve lost. Authors Tricia Emerson and Mary Stewart, lifetime change professionals, posed a question to themselves and their colleagues: What do you wish you had known when you started your toughest technology project? The result is The Technology Change Book. The tools in this book will help you: Build a case for change. Learn how to build a change team and create a change plan. Communicate effectively. Measure behavior change and react appropriately.

Professor Jin's new book, Global Technological Change: From Hard Technology to Soft Technology, is a powerful re-conceptualization of technological options and innovation management, which can help steer societies in assessing technologies for the 21st century. As Zhouying Jin correctly points out: in emerging knowledge societies, the "soft" technologies are drivers of physical "hard" technologies. These soft technologies include management, organizational design, education for creativity and entrepreneurship, good governance, prudent regulation, patent systems, efficient banking as well as fostering systems thinking, ecological and cultural balance. This book is a major intellectual advance that can help clarify human choices for decades to come.--Hazel Henderson, Advisory Council Member, US Office of Technology Assessment, National Science Foundation, National Academy of Engineering (1974-1980); President, Ethical Markets Media (USA and Brazil); member, Club of Rome --

Creative Technological Change draws upon a wide range of thinking from organisational theory, innovation studies and the sociology of technology. It explores the different ways in which these questions have been framed and answered, especially in relation to new 'virtual' technologies. The idea of metaphor is used to capture the differences between, and strengths and weaknesses of various ways of conceptualising the technology/organisation relationship. This approach offers the possibility of developing new ways of thinking about, viewing and ultimately responding creatively to the organisational challenges posed by technological change.

Pt. 1. The ingredients -- pt. 2. The governance of localised technological knowledge -- pt. 3. The introduction of localised technological change.

Stephen R. Barley reflects on over three decades of research to explore both the history of technological change and the approaches used to investigate how technologies, including intelligent technologies such as machine learning and robotics, are shaping our work and organizations.

Mokyr provides a long term perspective on the economic impact of technological change, surveying developments in production technologies between 500 BC and 1914.

Technological Change gathers together examples of the best current thinking on methodology and the theoretical perspectives that are increasingly of concern to historians of technology, whilst at the same time presenting other papers which reflect the 'state of the art' in key areas of historical debate. The volume emphasises the need both to establish a common forum for theoretical and empirical research and also to delineate the shared concerns of these two treatments, which are too often reflected as conflicting rather than mutually supportive approaches to the writing of the history of technology.