History of Technology
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009
Language: eng
Number of pages: 192
ISBN-13: 9780826438751
Subjects: Technology, history, great britain; Technology, social aspects
Description: "Technical standards have received increasing attention in recent years from historians of science and technology, management theorists and economists. Often, inquiry focuses on the emergence of stability, technical closure and culturally uniform modernity. Yet current literature also emphasizes the durability of localism, heterogeneity and user choice. This collection investigates the apparent tension between these trends using case studies from across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The History of Technology addresses tensions between material standards and process standards, explores the distinction between specifying standards and achieving convergence towards them, and examines some of the discontents generated by the reach of standards into 'everyday life'. Includes the Special Issue By whose standards? Standardization, stability and uniformity in the history of information and electrical technologies"--Bloomsbury Publishing.