[PDF] Upgrade Culture And Technological Change eBook

Author : Adam Richard Rottinghaus
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 33,30 MB
Release : 2021-12-30
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1000513793

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This book explores the origin and future of "upgrade culture," a collection of cultural habits and orientations based on the assumption that new technologies will rapidly, perpetually, and inevitably emerge. By analyzing discourses of technological change and the practices of marketing workers inside the consumer technology industry between the early 1980s and the late 2010s, the book describes the genesis, maintenance, and future of upgrade culture. Based on archival and popular sources, first-hand interviews with a range of industry professionals, and participant observations at industry-only events, the book attends to issues both intimate to the culture of marketing work and structural to the organization of the consumer technology industry. This book will have a broad appeal to social/cultural theorists of technology, marketing, and consumerism, as well as to scholars in business history, communication, cultural studies, media studies, sociology, and anthropology. The Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003193869-1/introduction-adam-richard-rottinghaus?context=ubx&refId=1bb75408-b5c2-4a69-bd20-082a73a77920

Author : Tony Bates
Publisher : Jossey-Bass
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 29,51 MB
Release : 2000
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN :

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"A required read for every university administrator grappling withthe complexities of technology and education. Bates has combined animpressive depth of experience and practice to produce anauthoritative and well-reasoned approach."--Bruce Pennycook,vice-principal, Information Systems and Technology, McGillUniversity "Digital technologies are revolutionizing the practices of teachingand learning at colleges and universities all around the world.This book will be helpful for all those who are planning andmanaging such organizational and technological change on theircampuses."--Timothy W. Luke, executive director, Institute forDistance and Distributed Learning, Virginia Tech Implementing new technology at a college or university requiresmore than simply buying new computers and establishing a Web site.The successful use of technology for teaching and learning alsodemands major changes in teaching and organizational culture. InManaging Technological Change, Tony Bates -- a world-renownedexpert on the use of technology in university teaching -- revealshow to create the new, technologically competitive academicorganization. He draws from recent research and best practice casestudies--as well as on his thirty years of experience in usingtechnology for teaching--to provide practical strategies formanaging change to ensure the successful use of technology. Readerswill learn how to win faculty support for teaching with technologyand get advice on appropriate decision-making and reportingstructures. Other topics covered include reward systems, estimatingcosts of teaching by technology, and copyright issues. Bates alsodetails the essential procedures for funding new technology-basedsystems, managing the technology, and monitoring its ongoingeducational effectiveness in anticipation of future changes.Throughout the book, he maintains a focus on the human factors thatmust be addressed, identifying the risks and penalties oftechnologically based teaching and showing how to manage thosehazards.

Author : Zhouying Jin
Publisher : Intellect Books
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 11,32 MB
Release : 2011
Category : Appropriate technology
ISBN : 9781841503769

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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 --

Author : Robert Douglas Friedel
Publisher : MIT Press (MA)
Page : 606 pages
File Size : 34,19 MB
Release : 2007
Category : History
ISBN :

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How technological change in the West has been driven by the pursuit of improvement: a history of technology, from plows and printing presses to penicillin, the atomic bomb, and the computer.

Author : Robert Friedel
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 601 pages
File Size : 40,61 MB
Release : 2010-02-26
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 026251401X

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How technological change in the West has been driven by the pursuit of improvement: a history of technology, from plows and printing presses to penicillin, the atomic bomb, and the computer. Why does technology change over time, how does it change, and what difference does it make? In this sweeping, ambitious look at a thousand years of Western experience, Robert Friedel argues that technological change comes largely through the pursuit of improvement—the deep-rooted belief that things could be done in a better way. What Friedel calls the "culture of improvement" is manifested every day in the ways people carry out their tasks in life—from tilling fields and raising children to waging war. Improvements can be ephemeral or lasting, and one person's improvement may not always be viewed as such by others. Friedel stresses the social processes by which we define what improvements are and decide which improvements will last and which will not. These processes, he emphasizes, have created both winners and losers in history. Friedel presents a series of narratives of Western technology that begin in the eleventh century and stretch into the twenty-first. Familiar figures from the history of invention are joined by others—the Italian preacher who described the first eyeglasses, the dairywomen displaced from their control over cheesemaking, and the little-known engineer who first suggested a grand tower to Gustav Eiffel. Friedel traces technology from the plow and the printing press to the internal combustion engine, the transistor, and the space shuttle. Friedel also reminds us that faith in improvement can sometimes have horrific consequences, as improved weaponry makes warfare ever more deadly and the drive for improving human beings can lead to eugenics and even genocide. The most comprehensive attempt to tell the story of Western technology in many years, engagingly written and lavishly illustrated, A Culture of Improvement documents the ways in which the drive for improvement has shaped our modern world.

Author : Mitra Das
Publisher : Peter Lang
Page : 164 pages
File Size : 29,54 MB
Release : 2008
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781433101892

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Technology is not value-free; nor does it exist in a vacuum. It needs a social basis - technology is affected by society and influences it. Technology, Values, and Society illustrates this using an examination of cross-cultural case studies representing simple, intermediate, and complex societies. Certain forms of technology exist when conducive values and structures sustain them. However, this relationship is not one-way. Technological changes do precipitate social and value changes. It is impossible to sustain egalitarian values in a society involving technology based on hierarchical relationships. Understanding this connection is vital if we are to keep some control over the way in which technology affects us. This revised edition brings the topic to life for both faculty and students.

Author : Elena Simakova
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 11,54 MB
Release : 2013-05-07
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1136238093

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Global corporations initiate, join and maintain socio-technological change and hence, alter the ways in which we organize our lives. Demanding significant investment of resources and time, the development and implementation of new technologies on different levels must take into consideration these subtle processes. As such, it is particularly important that we have a greater insight into the practices of hi-tech corporations, in view of the often inflated promises of and concerns about the destiny of technological breakthroughs, especially those promising sizeable economic outcomes and societal transformation. Elena Simakova undertook a lengthy ethnographic study, working alongside marketing managers in a global IT corporation in their Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) headquarters in the UK. Using the experience gained through a close participation in their everyday corporate rituals and routines, her account challenges common perceptions of how corporations make the world think and act with regard to technologies in particular ways. The book contains an interesting case study on the launch of a radio frequency identification (RFID) based solution. Unravelling the construction of expectations, inclusions and exclusions around emerging technologies, this reflexive account also tackles uneasy practical and methodological questions pertinent to corporate ethnography. This book is an essential read for scholars in science and technology studies, economic sociology, anthropology, as well as management and organizational studies and research policy.

Author : Rosalind Williams
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 15,33 MB
Release : 2003-08-11
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9780262265065

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A humanistic account of the changing role of technology in society, by a historian and a former Dean of Students and Undergraduate Education at MIT. When Warren Kendall Lewis left Spring Garden Farm in Delaware in 1901 to enter MIT, he had no idea that he was becoming part of a profession that would bring untold good to his country but would also contribute to the death of his family's farm. In this book written a century later, Professor Lewis's granddaughter, a cultural historian who has served in the administration of MIT, uses her grandfather's and her own experience to make sense of the rapidly changing role of technology in contemporary life. Rosalind Williams served as Dean of Students and Undergraduate Education at MIT from 1995 through 2000. From this vantage point, she watched a wave of changes, some planned and some unexpected, transform many aspects of social and working life—from how students are taught to how research and accounting are done—at this major site of technological innovation. In Retooling, she uses this local knowledge to draw more general insights into contemporary society's obsession with technology. Today technology-driven change defines human desires, anxieties, memories, imagination, and experiences of time and space in unprecedented ways. But technology, and specifically information technology, does not simply influence culture and society; it is itself inherently cultural and social. If there is to be any reconciliation between technological change and community, Williams argues, it will come from connecting technological and social innovation—a connection demonstrated in the history that unfolds in this absorbing book.

Author : Yassin Sankar
Publisher : Wiley-Interscience
Page : 408 pages
File Size : 36,17 MB
Release : 1991
Category : Technological innovations
ISBN :

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A systems approach to managing technological change, this book shows how to achieve management excellence by incorporating humanistic needs into the technological job design framework.