We live in a dynamic economic and commerical world, surrounded by objects of remarkable complexity and power. In many industries, changes in products and technologies have brought with them new kinds of firms and forms of organization. We are discovering news ways of structuring work, of bringing buyers and sellers together, and of creating and using market information. Although our fast-moving…
All design is situated -- carried out from an embedded position. Design involves many participants and encompasses a range of interactions and interdependencies among designers, designs, design methods, and users. Design is also multidisciplinary, extending beyond the traditional design professions into such domains as health, culture, education, and transportation. This book presents eighteen …
In this text prominent economists present the pros and cons of government support for national champions of industry over political governance.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
In Building the Trident Network, Maggie Mort approaches the United Kingdom's Trident submarine and missile system as a sociotechnical network. Drawing on the sociology of scientific and technical knowledge and on actor-network theory, Mort recounts how the Trident program was stabilized in the United Kingdom and brought into "successful" production. She uncovers the nature of this success by re…
In a changing world, everyone designs: each individual person and each collective subject, from enterprises to institutions, from communities to cities and regions, must define and enhance a life project. Sometimes these projects generate unprecedented solutions; sometimes they converge on common goals and realize larger transformations. As Ezio Manzini describes in this book, we are witnessing…
Clapperton Mavhunga's collection of essays about science, technology, and innovation (STI) from an African perspective opens with the idea, "Things do not (always) mean the same from everywhere; when we insist that only?our? meaning is the meaning, we silence other people?s meanings." Mavhunga and his contributors argue that our contemporary definitions of STI are those of countries and culture…
Short biographies of: Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Konrad Zuse, John V. Atanasoff, John V. Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert, Howard Aiken, Jay W. Forrester, Thomas J. Watson, Sr., William Norris, H. Ross Perot, William Shockley, Robert Noyce, Jack Kilby, Marcian E. (Ted) Hoff, Gene Amdahl, Seymour Cray, Gordon Bell, Grace Murray Hopper, John Backus, John Kemeny, Tho…
"I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. . . . Plastics." This line from the film The Graduate has come to symbolize the hubris, promise, and disappointment embodied in one of the world's most ubiquitous materials. At present, plastics are cheap, widely used, and durable. But that durability means that plastics persist in the environment for decades. Images of swaths of the ocean or …
"Looks at American independent inventors during the rise of corporate research and development"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
How can American manufacturing recapture its former dominance in the globalized industrial economy? In Worker Leadership, Fred Stahl proposes a strategy to boost enterprise productivity and restore America's industrial power. Stahl outlines a revolutionary transformation of industrial culture that offers workers real control of production operations and manufacturing processes (as well as a mon…