This book attempts to provide a theoretical framework for answering difficult questions evoked by the concept of technology choice primarily by conducting a review of the Appropriate Technology movement and its ideas and experiments.
Originally published in 1994 this book examines problems related to investment planning, capacity additions, and choice of technology in dynamic manufacturing systems characterized by multiple products, dynamic demand growth, uncertainty in demand and availability of alternative technologies. A model-based methodology is developed that focuses on trade-offs between flexible and conventional technology. The research conducted for this book is directed to the development of tools to support investment decisions in production capacity over medium and long-term planning horizons.
An analysis of the occupational factors that shape the technology choices made by people who perform the same type of work. Why do people who perform largely the same type of work make different technology choices in the workplace? An automotive design engineer working in India, for example, finds advanced information and communication technologies essential, allowing him to work with far-flung colleagues; a structural engineer in California relies more on paper-based technologies for her everyday work; and a software engineer in Silicon Valley operates on multiple digital levels simultaneously all day, continuing after hours on a company-supplied home computer and network connection. In Technology Choices, Diane Bailey and Paul Leonardi argue that occupational factors—rather than personal preference or purely technological concerns—strongly shape workers' technology choices. Drawing on extensive field work—a decade's worth of observations and interviews in seven engineering firms in eight countries—Bailey and Leonardi challenge the traditional views of technology choices: technological determinism and social constructivism. Their innovative occupational perspective allows them to explore how external forces shape ideas, beliefs, and norms in ways that steer individuals to particular technology choices—albeit in somewhat predictable and generalizable ways. They examine three relationships at the heart of technology choices: human to technology, technology to technology, and human to human. An occupational perspective, they argue, helps us not only to understand past technology choices, but also to predict future ones.
Environmental constraints and market uncertainties create new challenges for electricity generation. In this title, originally published in 1991, the authors present a simulation model with a capability for highly detailed activity to identify cost-minimising investment options under different assumptions about demand, costs, regulation, and other economic and environmental factors. Applying the model to two U.S. regions having sharply different electricity demand and supply characteristics, they identify the importance of advanced technologies and augmented electricity trade among regions. This title is ideal for students interested in environmental studies.
The second edition of Construction Technology: Analysis and Choice has been expanded to include commercial buildings. This now covers, in a single textbook, all the basic forms of construction studied on professional courses. The book takes as its theme the process of choice: what the expert has to know and how he/she might think through the decisions to be made about the design, production, maintenance and disposal of buildings. It is written with the conviction that by focusing on the process of choice, the range of theory and knowledge that is useful to practice becomes explicit, making the link between knowledge and practice, and between understanding and experience. The new edition has been updated throughout with extensive additions to Chapter13: Manufacture and Assembly and to Chapter 15: Sustainability. An entire new section has been added, covering all the main elements of commercial construction. Students will find here explanations of how environments, structural behaviour, production know-how, cost and social concerns such as sustainability can be taken into account in the choice of construction. They will also gain a clear understanding of the construction details and specifications adopted for both housing and commercial buildings in the UK at the beginning of the 21st century. Provides a framework to think through proposed solutions Sets the choice of solution in both time and place, and in the context of sustainability Focuses on key questions: will the proposal fail; and can it be built? Considers a building’s response to loading, environmental conditions and time Looks at the production process as manufacture and assembly Book website at www.wiley.com/go/bryanconstructiontech2e Contains nearly 200 fully referenced, clear line drawings to download for free, as well as suggested learning activities for lecturers to incorporate into their teaching programmes.
Technological Choices applies the critical tools of archaeology to the subject of technology and its impact on humankind throughout the ages. An examination of the challenges technological innovations present to various cultures, Technological Choices asserts that in any society, such choices are made on the basis of cultural values and social relations, rather than on the inherent benefits in technology itself. Of course, this revolutionary viewpoint has critical implications for contemporary Western societies. Based on case studies covering a wide range of chronologies and geographies, Technological Choices moves rapidly from Neolithic Europe to the modern industrial age, stopping on the way to examine the tribes of Papua, New Guinea, rural Indian and North African societies as well as several European peasant communities. The techniques studied range from the manufacture of stone implements to the development of high-tech transportation devices. With its breadth of subject matter and multidisciplinary approach, Technological Choices offers new insight into the interrelationship between technology and society. Also unprecedented is the book's emphasis on the functional aspects of material culture.
From the New York Times bestselling author of How We Got To Now and Farsighted Forget everything you’ve ever read about the age of dumbed-down, instant-gratification culture. In this provocative, unfailingly intelligent, thoroughly researched, and surprisingly convincing big idea book, Steven Johnson draws from fields as diverse as neuroscience, economics, and media theory to argue that the pop culture we soak in every day—from Lord of the Rings to Grand Theft Auto to The Simpsons—has been growing more sophisticated with each passing year, and, far from rotting our brains, is actually posing new cognitive challenges that are actually making our minds measurably sharper. After reading Everything Bad is Good for You, you will never regard the glow of the video game or television screen the same way again. With a new afterword by the author.