We see that javascript is disabled or not supported by your browser - javascript is needed for important actions on the site. Read more

What's New - Home - Login

Member $avings: $81,590,626.08 | Books Available: 786,886 | Members Online: 38

Swap Used Books - Buy New Books at Great Prices!

How To Swap Books Sign Up Search submenu

PBS Market (New Books)

Gift Buying Guide

Book Browser Advanced Search Books Posted Today Member Book Reviews Award Winning Books NYT Best Sellers Amazon Best Sellers Most Traveled Copies Club Wish List

Discussion Forums Book Lists

Club Lists My Book Lists My Watched Lists Create a List

Blog Donations

School Donation Program In Memory of... Military Donation Program Friends of PBS

Box-O-Books Maps The Eclectic Pen Fun Stuff

20 Questions Sudoku Bookmark Creator

Top 100

Requests Posts Swappers Referrers Reviewers

Pulse of PBS Spread The Word

Invite Friends Bookmarks Facebook Page Facebook App More Ways...

Photo Gallery Recipes Club Tag Cloud Member Testimonials

Help Center submenu

How To Swap Books Browse Help Docs Ask the Librarian PBS Member Icons Live Help

Kiosk

PBS Market (New Books) Go Shopping Buy Credits Buy PBS Money Upgrade Membership Gift Certificates Transfer Credits

Need Help?

Search - Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies

Innovation and Its Enemies Why People Resist New Technologies
Author: Calestous Juma

In the early 1980s, cell phones and transgenic crops (or GMOs) both made their commercial debuts. Both have had far-reaching socioeconomic effects: cell phones have been key in facilitating communications, banking, business, and education among people in developing countries, and transgenic crops have increased agricultural output in areas with ... more »arid land and underperforming farms. At the same time there are health concerns surrounding both of the technologies: that cell phones may cause cancer, while GMOs could cause a host of problems, both to human health and the wider environment. While there is little to no scientific evidence that either technology causes ill health effects, one technology has been universally embraced, while the other has been largely demonized. Why this disparity?

This book shows that many debates over new technologies are framed in the context of risks to moral values, human health, and environmental safety. But it argues that behind these legitimate concerns often lie deeper, but unacknowledged, socioeconomic considerations. Technological tensions are often heightened by perceptions that the benefits of new technologies will accrue to small sections of society while the risks are more widely distributed. Similarly, innovations that threaten to alter cultural identities tend to generate intense social concern. As such, societies that exhibit great economic and political inequities are likely to experience more intense technological controversies.

Innovation and Its Enemies identifies the tension between the need for innovation and the pressure to maintain continuity, social order and stability as one of today's biggest policy challenges, and it makes the case that modern controversies such as those over GMOs grow out of distrust in public and private institutions. It demonstrates the extent to which this distrust shapes and influences technological controversies by drawing on a number of historical examples, including coffee, electricity, margarine, farm mechanization, recorded music, transgenic crops and transgenic animals, to show how new technologies emerge, take root and create new institutional ecologies that favor their dominance in the marketplace. It ultimately makes the case for shifting greater responsibility on public leaders to work with scientists to manage technological change and to expand public engagement on scientific and technological matters.

ISBN-13: 9780190467036
ISBN-10: 0190467037
Publication Date: 7/1/2016
Pages: 376
Edition: 1
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Oxford University Press
Book Type: Hardcover
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Genres:

Back to the Top ↑

Search - Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies

Loading...