Browse

Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo’s Commuter Train Network is an exploration of collective life formed at the interstices of human and machine operation within one of the most complex and large-scale technical infrastructures in the world. Adopting a simultaneous critical and optimistic approach, it is an attempt to think with the specific quality of relations formed within Tokyo’s commuter rail infrastructure in order to develop a mode of analysis adequate to the technological complexity of contemporary society and to explore emergent ontologies of human and machine co-constitution. In so doing, it draws attention not only to Tokyo’s commuter train network’s infamously packed trains and precision schedule but more importantly its operation at the extreme edge of sustainability beyond its structural capacity. Such a system, it posits, embodies the contradictory and unsustainable logic defining our contemporary relationship with technology. At the same time, through a theoretically novel approach that emphasizes the generative gaps within the network’s immersive mediation, Anthropology of the Machine advances Tokyo’s commuter train network as a unique setting through which to question received discourses on technology and to re-conceptualize the human relationship with machines toward a more sustainable future.

This Handbook is the definitive source of major academic research on university technology transfer and academic entrepreneurship, featuring chapters from the leading scholars in this field. Given that the literature on university technology transfer and academic entrepreneurship is highly interdisciplinary, another important aspect of this Handbook is that our contributors represent a variety of social sciences (e.g., economics, sociology, psychology, and political science), fields in business administration (e.g., strategy, organizational behavior, entrepreneurship, marketing, and finance), and other professional programs and areas of study (e.g., law, public administration, and engineering). Since university technology transfer and academic entrepreneurship is a global phenomenon, the Handbook also includes a substantial amount of international evidence, which reflects a variety of national perspectives on this topic.

The construction of tens of thousands of large dams across the planet’s surface brought about one of the largest biophysical transformations of the twentieth century and has irrevocably altered human-environment relations. The geopolitical dimensions of this “concrete revolution” have remained largely hidden. The history of large dams and more generally river basin development is simultaneously environmental, social, technical and geopolitical. This book focuses on the activities of the United States government, in particular the Bureau of Reclamation, America’s premier water development agency, to exercise and disseminate technical expertise regarding large hydroelectric dams and river basin planning and development to the world’s “underdeveloped regions” from the 1930s to the 1970s. The Bureau’s water resource development activities, which ranged from short-term consultations to intensive multi-year programs, were deeply influenced by the imperatives of US foreign policy during the Cold War era. Detailed cases presented in the book—including Bureau interventions in China, Lebanon, Ethiopia and the Mekong Basin—underscore how the geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War facilitated an alignment of economic and technical networks of development that were highly favorable to the dissemination of large dams. Large dams and other technology-centered development projects are never purely technical undertakings whose successes or failures hinge on the ingenuity of the engineers who design and build them or the motivations of state officials who fund and promote them. The lessons of the history presented here are that large dams and river basin planning are complex hybrids of nature, technology and society.

This volume introduces the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to help explain the divergent ways in which states and societies conceptualize futures achievable through and supportive of advances in science and technology. Sociotechnological imaginaries add a new dimension to work in anthropology and political theory dealing with collective beliefs about social order. Work in these fields has not been properly attentive to the role of science and technology in shaping human possibilities. At the same time, sociotechnical imaginaries supplement more micro-focused work in Science and Technology Studies (STS), showing how developments in science and technology take place within wider cultural understandings of how societies ought to live, and how such developments are bound up with existing structures of normativity and power. Through a mix of case studies, together with a theoretical introduction and a synoptic conclusion, the volume demonstrates how the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries can lead to more sophisticated understandings of the politics of science and technology. The case studies illustrate how different imaginations of the goals, priorities, benefits and risks of social life are co-produced along with the construction of science and technology—at scales ranging from institutional to national to global. Chapters ask how the work of collective imagining responds to and accommodates some of the salient political challenges of modernity: democracy, the expert/lay divide, novel understandings of life, public ethics, and institutional accountability. The book thereby opens up a fertile space for the comparative analysis of science, technology, politics, and political cultures, as well as for methodological cross-fertilization among diverse STS-related disciplines.

The first detailed study of the ‘peak oil movement,’ this book combines sociology, literary criticism, history and environmental studies to explore an early twenty-first century environmental social movement and its implications for American politics, contemporary social movements, and environmental issues, including climate change. It describes the ideology of ‘peakism’ and the actions taken by over 100,000 peak oil believers to prepare for the post-carbon future, and places this group in the historical context of beliefs about scarcity and abundance in recent American history. A group of leftists who largely responded as survivalists to a perceived environmental crisis, Peak Politics views the peak oil movement as an indicator of the rise of libertarian ideals in American political culture over the last four decades, and explores the role of digital technologies in this ‘libertarian shift.’ It argues that while ‘peakists’ overestimated the rapidity and consequences of energy depletion, they present an important case study of proportionate responses to the environmental crises of our current age, the Anthropocene, such as climate change and resource depletion. Their experiences provide an instructive study of the social organization of denial of environmental problems; the role of oil in modern life; the political impact of digital technologies; the political quiescence of some leftist environmentalists; the racial and gender dynamics of post-apocalyptic fantasies; and the convergence of global environmental problems and libertarian political solutions.