The Nature Of Technological Knowledge Are Models Of Scientific Change Relevant

One of the ironies of our time is the sparsity of useful analytic tools for understanding change and development within technology itself. For all the diatribes about the disastrous effects of technology on modern life, for all the equally uncritical paeans to technology as the panacea for human ills, the vociferous pro- and anti-technology movements have failed to illuminate the nature of technology. On a more scholarly level, in the midst of claims by Marxists and non-Marxists alike about the technological underpinnings of the major social and economic changes of the last couple of centuries, and despite advice given to government and industry about managing science and technology by a small army of consultants and policy analysts, technology itself remains locked inside an impenetrable black box, a deus ex machina to be invoked when all other explanations of puzzling social and economic pheoomena fail. The discipline that has probably done most to penetrate that black box in recent years by studying the 1 internal development of technology is history. Historians of technology and certain economic historians have carried out careful and detailed studies on the genesis and impact of technological innovations, and the structu-re of the social systems associated with those innovations. Within the past few decades tentative consensus about the periodization and the major traditions within the history of technology has begun to emerge, at least as far as Britain and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth century are concerned.

This volume is a collection of essays of a philosophical nature on the subject of technology, introducing authors from the Portuguese-speaking community, namely from Portugal itself, Africa and Brazil. Their contributions detail a unique perspective on technology, placing this important topic within the historical, ideological and social contexts of their countries, all of which share a common language. The shared history of these countries and the cultural and economic specificities of each one have stimulated singular insights into these thinkers’ reflections. The essays are thematically diverse. Among the topics covered are technogenic knowledge, visions of technology, risks and uncertainties, mediatization, digitalization, and datafication, engineering practice and ethics, alternative technoscientific strategies, ontotechnologies of the body, virtual and archive. The contributions also explore other themes that are more closely related to the semi-peripheral world, such as technological dependence and the incorporation of Western technology into the social structure of ancestral communities. This book appeals to students and researchers and provides a voice to authors whose work are not usually available in English-language publications. It serves as an ideal guide for all those who seek rigorous and geographically widespread knowledge regarding thinking on technology in several Portuguese-speaking countries.

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.

In this original and thoughtful book, Govindan Parayil draws together current scholarship from disciplines ranging from history to economics to sociology as he develops a cohesive theory of technological change. Drawing on a detailed case study of the Green Revolution in Indian agriculture, Parayil convincingly argues that technological change is contingent upon the social-historical process of knowledge change.

Originally published in 1993 this book presents the findings of 14 teams involved in a research initiative to examine the initiation and resonse to innovation in firms. It draws together the many strands which were discovered to influence the successful generation and adoption of new technologies. The core issues in technology management are looked at, including skills and expertise, markets and marketing, finance and the issue of technology collaboration both on a domestic and international basis. Technology is shown to be at the very heart of corporate strategy and policy formation.

Technology plays a critical role in the management of health care, the system, its delivery and its organizations. This book examines the role of technology in the delivery of health care by physicians and other health care workers, and their respective roles in the management of health care technology. The complexity of the health care environment and the difficulties in managing technology in general (and in health care in particular) makes this book a landmark exploration for the purpose of creating in-roads into the largely uncharted territory of health care technology. The chapters in this book will introduce the horizons that are open for scholarly pursuit in this area. Managing Technology in Healthcare has two main objectives. First, to provide the reader with an overview of the main issues of concern and the topics of study in managing technology in health care. Second, to offer the reader specific knowledge embedded in the eleven chapters of the book, covering a broad range of topics of interest to health care and to R&D/technology scholars and practitioners.

A unique examination of the software development process, arguing that it must undergo a fundamental re-examination of its guiding principles in order for significant progress to take place.

In this volume, scholars from these two very different traditions are brought together. Never before has a single volume contained such a distinguished and diverse group of historians of technology.