Kathy Walker

Judith Burnett

Peter Senker

This book questions whether technologies are the rational, tangible, scientific, forward-thinking, neutral objects they are so often perceived to be, exploring instead how powerful, mythic ideas about technologies drive our social understanding and our expectations of them. Against a rising tide of information, we encounter significant technological, scientific, and medical advances which promise to create an educated, humane, and equal world. This book explores that promise, deconstructing technologies to conclude that though they do afford us significant and empowering advances, they remain largely cloaked in mystery, and often promise more than they can deliver. Contributors from diverse intellectual backgrounds and political and epistemological stances - spanning sociology and psychosocial investigations, innovation studies, and scientists - combine philosophical inquiry and empirical case studies to create a book which is at once provocative, innovative, and exciting in the challenges it poses.

Innovation and Inequality

The Myths of Technology

Generations: The Time Machine in Theory and Practice challenges the fragmented and diverse use of the concept of generation commonly found in the social sciences. It approaches the concept in a manner that stretches the sociological imagination away from its orientation toward the present by building the concept of the passage of time into our understanding of the social. It proposes an innovative and exciting view of the field of generations, lifting it out from life course and cohort analysis, and reconstituting the area with fresh and dynamic ways of seeing. With its unique, intellectually innovative and sustained critical study of generational work, Generations will appeal to scholars across a range of social sciences and humanities, and will be of particular interest to social theorists and anthropologists, as well as sociologists of social history, consumption, identity and culture.

Judith Burnett

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