Rudi Volti
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 256635 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Rudi Volti |
| PRENOMES | Rudi |
| SOBRENOME | Volti |
| ASSINATURA | VOLTI R |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Pitzer College |
| VERIFICADO | Não |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 56 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 76 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 56 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1977 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2020 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
Technological Determinism
According to proponents of technological determinism, technology is the major driver of the ways in which societies, cultures, economies, and governments are structured, as well as being the most powerful force that causes them to change. In this entry, examples of technological determinism are given, but the shortcomings of this paradigm are also noted, as is the prospect of technology being a force beyond human control. Perspectives on technolo…
O gburn, W illiam F. (1886–1959)
William F. Ogburn was an American sociologist who over his five‐decade academic career wrote on a variety of topics. He is best known for the concept of cultural lag, which was formulated in his book Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature . This entry discusses Ogburn's approach to sociology and sociological methodology, with particular attention paid to the concept of cultural lag and the criticisms to which it has been subjec…
Technology, Politics, and Society in China
The Devil’s Wheels
The Devil’s Wheels: men and motorcycling in the Weimar Republic." Social History, 42(2), pp. 288–289
An Alternative History of Bicycles and Motorcycles
Reviewed by: An Alternative History of Bicycles and Motorcycles: Two-Wheeled Transportation and Material Culture by Steven E. Alford, Suzanne Ferriss Rudi Volti (bio) An Alternative History of Bicycles and Motorcycles: Two-Wheeled Transportation and Material Culture. By Steven E. Alford and Suzanne Ferriss. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. Pp. 189. $80. If there is an “alternative” history there also must be a “standard” history of bicyc…
An introduction to the sociology of work and occupations
The Yugo
Reviewed by: The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History Rudi Volti (bio) The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History. By Jason Vuic. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010. Pp. 262. $26. Was it really “the worst car in history”? Hardly, but the saga of the Yugo does demonstrate that the manufacture and marketing of automobiles is not something to be undertaken lightly. The initial impetus for the Yugo was Yugoslavia’s belated entr…
Ferdinand Porsche-Genesis of Genius
Reviewed by: Ferdinand Porsche—Genesis of Genius: Road, Racing, and Aviation Innovation, 1900 to 1933 Rudi Volti (bio) Ferdinand Porsche—Genesis of Genius: Road, Racing, and Aviation Innovation, 1900 to 1933. By Karl Ludvigsen. Cambridge, Mass.: Bentley Publishers, 2009. Pp. ix+486. $99.95. In the contemporary automobile scene, few names have as much resonance as Porsche. For connoisseurs, Porsche is synonymous with superbly engineered, fast, and…
Bodies in Motion
Reviewed by: Bodies in Motion: Evolution and Experience in Motorcycling Rudi Volti (bio) Bodies in Motion: Evolution and Experience in Motorcycling. By Steven L. Thompson. Duluth, Minn.: Aero Design & Mfg. Co., 2008. Pp. 417. $19.95. Motorcycles provide a primary means of inexpensive transport in many poor and middle-income countries today, just as they did in Europe and Japan a few decades ago. Though automobiles are now the main type of persona…
The Encyclopedia of the Age of the Industrial Revolution, 1700–1920 (review)
Reviewed by: The Encyclopedia of the Age of the Industrial Revolution, 1700–1920 Rudi Volti (bio) The Encyclopedia of the Age of the Industrial Revolution, 1700–1920. Edited by Christine Rider. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007. 2 vols. Pp. xxxv+604. $225. Coined by the nineteenth-century French radical Auguste Blanqui, the phrase “Industrial Revolution” has been widely invoked by historians and social scientists despite, or perhaps due to, …
A Car for the Great Asian Multitude
Although the vehicles-to-population ratios of China and India are small when compared to Europe, Japan, and the United States, sales of cars and light trucks in the two countries have increased rapidly in recent years. This article documents the growth in the number of vehicles in China and India and compares the expansion of their vehicle fleets to the historical experiences of countries that achieved high levels of automobile ownership decades …
Rethinking Science, Technology, and Social Change
Route 66
Reviewed by: Route 66: Iconography of the American Highway Rudi Volti (bio) Route 66: Iconography of the American Highway. By Arthur Krim . Santa Fe: Center for American Places, 2006; distributed by University of Chicago Press. Pp. xix+220. $35. How does a 2,400-mile strip of asphalt and concrete become a cultural icon? Once a major transportation corridor, Route 66 still exerts a hold on the imagination more than two decades after its formal dec…
Pushing the Limits
Reviewed by: Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering Rudi Volti (bio) Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering. By Henry Petroski . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Pp. xxii+288. $25. It is likely that most readers of T&C have read at least one of Henry Petroski's books on engineering and design. A few of these books have dealt with important though mundane items like paper clips and pencils. Pushing the Limits, his twelfth boo…
For the Love of Cars
Mass Motorisation in Spain
Until the late 1970s an authoritarian State’s commitment to a policy of economic self-sufficiency motivated the creation of an indigenous automobile industry. The mass production of automobiles began in 1950, when a government agency, the Instituto Nacional de Industria, sponsored the creation of the Sociedad Española de Automóviles de Turismo (SEAT). The Spanish government used SEAT as a basis for further industrial development by mandating the …
Bicycle
Reviewed by: Bicycle: The History Rudi Volti (bio) Bicycle: The History. By David V. Herlihy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. Pp. 470. $35. Many epochal technological innovations have had their critics as well as their enthusiasts, but who can find fault with the bicycle? For environmentalists and supporters of appropriate technologies, the bicycle offers a nonpolluting, energy-efficient, and inexpensive means of transportation. Fo…
Playing with Trains
Reviewed by: Playing with Trains: A Passion beyond Scale Rudi Volti (bio) Playing with Trains: A Passion beyond Scale. By Sam Posey. New York: Random House, 2004. Pp. xiv+217. $21.95. Over a stretch of sixteen years, Sam Posey invested six thousand hours in the construction of an HO-scale (3.5 millimeters = 1 foot) version of the long-defunct Colorado Midland Railroad, at times putting in twelve-hour days for several weeks running. Supplementing …
Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature (review)
When the Society for the History of Technology was formed in 1958, its founders hoped that the new organization would provide a multidisciplinary home for scholars concerned with the historical interactions of technology, society, and culture. One indication of the society's intellectual eclecticism was the name of its journal, Technology and Culture. Another was the selection of a sociologist, William Fielding Ogburn (1886-1959), to serve as the…
Crisis and Innovation in Asian Technology (review)
Crisis and Innovation in Asian Technology. Edited by William W. Keller and Richard J. Samuels. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xi+251. $75/$27
Reuniting History and Sociology Through Research on Technological Change
Scholarly pursuits of the topics encompassed by science, technology, and society (STS) provide many opportunities to combine sociology with history. This article notes some of the reasons why sociology has tended to ignore history but asserts that scholarly explorations of STS topics, and in particular the study of technological change, provide many opportunities for engagements with history. A number of research issues are presented that focus o…
Technology Transfer and International Production
Few nations have made such rapid strides in industrial development as South Korea. In recent years, numerous publications have addressed the reasons for the country's spectacular industrial ascent, but Jin Cyhn's Technology Transfer and International Production takes up a largely unexplored topic, the efforts of Korean firms to upgrade their technological capabilities [End Page 197] by manufacturing products marketed under familiar labels. Dubbed…
Mao's War against Nature
As was the custom during China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, let us begin with a quotation from Chairman Mao: "To struggle against the heavens is endless joy, to struggle against the earth is endless joy, to struggle against people is endless joy." Written in his youth, these lines epitomize Mao Zedong's approach to governing and guiding China. On many occasions the result of this mentality was disaster for China's people and the land …
Tiger Technology
Not so long ago, most East Asian countries were economic backwaters, no better off than the other struggling nations of the Third World. Today, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and (to a lesser extent) Malaysia have achieved an economic status that puts them squarely among the middle-class nations of the world while experiencing rates of growth that, if continued, will propel them even higher. So rapid and extensive has been their ascent that it is freq…
Science and Dissent in Post-Mao China
When in 1989 Chinese astrophysicist Fang Lizhi sought asylum for months in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, later escaping to the West, worldwide attention focused on the plight of liberal intellectuals in China. In Science and Dissent in Post-Mao China H. Lyman Miller examines the scientific community in China and prominent members such as Fang and physicist and historian of science Xu Liangying. Drawing on Chinese academic journals, newspapers, int…
An introduction to the sociology of work and occupations
Ways of the World
This book has four objectives: to provide a comprehensive history of roads and bridges and the vehicles that have used them; to properly document that history; to explore the development of roads as part of a larger societal system; and to provide a good reference list and literature survey of the world's English-language literature on the history of roads. To achieve these objectives the author has, in his own words, written at a number of level…
A Century of Automobility
Essay A CENTURY OF AUTOMOBILITY RUDI V O L T I When Charles E. and J. Frank Duryea along with a few associates put together thirteen crude automobiles in 1896 for sale to the pub lic, they likely had no notion that they were participating in the cre ation ofa system oftransportation thatwould profoundly alterAmer ican life. In the hundred years that have followed, the automobile has brought such massive changes that we are still trying to com…
Technological Determinism
According to proponents of technological determinism, technology is the major driver of the ways in which societies, cultures, economies, and governments are structured, as well as being the most powerful force that causes them to change. In this entry, examples of technological determinism are given, but the shortcomings of this paradigm are also noted, as is the prospect of technology being a force beyond human control. Perspectives on technolo…
Rethinking Science, Technology, and Social Change
Mass Motorisation in Spain
Until the late 1970s an authoritarian State’s commitment to a policy of economic self-sufficiency motivated the creation of an indigenous automobile industry. The mass production of automobiles began in 1950, when a government agency, the Instituto Nacional de Industria, sponsored the creation of the Sociedad Española de Automóviles de Turismo (SEAT). The Spanish government used SEAT as a basis for further industrial development by mandating the …
Consuming Power
Journal Article Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies. By David E. Nye. (Cambridge: mit Press, 1998. xiv, 331 pp. $25.00, ISBN 0-262-14063-2.) Get access Rudi Volti Rudi Volti Pitzer College, Claremont, California Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 85, Issue 3, December 1998, Pages 1050–1051, https://doi.org/10.2307/2567237 Published: 01 December 1998
Organizations and Expertise in China
A number of analyses of contemporary Chinese society have centered on the presumed conflicts between politically reliable "reds" and technically proficient "experts." This article challenges this mode of analysis by indicating the multi-dimensionality of both categories and by setting them in their historic and cultural contexts. Particular emphasis is accorded to the importance of organiza tional affiliation in defining the social role of the ex…
The Indian Industrial Worker
Rural Industrialization in China by Jon Sigurdson, and
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 541 The presumptions that scientific planning can be equated with suc cessful social planning and, more particularly, that scientists (Indian or otherwise) would be a likely vanguard for radical social change are, perhaps, the most visionary aspects of Rahman’s program, particu larly since he himself indicates that scientists most often fail to ap preciate that science and technology have social contexts. Th…
Rural Industrialization in China
Technology, Politics, and Society in China
Science, Politics, and the Agricultural Revolution in Asia
Technology, Politics, and Society in China
The National Motorcycle Museum, Birmingham, England
These are not good times for the British economy. Many of the industries that Britain formerly dominated are now in decline, hobbled by inefficiencies and undercut by foreign competition. In some cases, they have all but disappeared. So it has been with the British motorcycle industry, once the world leader in technological development, market share, and success on the racetrack. A few specialist manufacturers soldier on, but the commanding posit…
China Takes Off
180 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE seen as the representatives of employers; the tendency of engineers to avoid involvement in potentially contentious situations; and the re lationship between trade unions and professional associations. On this last point, the author accepts too readily the traditional interpre tation of professional engineering institutions as interest groups, without appreciating their important historical role as means …
China Takes off
Disappearing through the Skylight
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1151 provides a conclusion by taking up the open-ended question of the possibility of controlling technology. Volti examines the role of specific groups, such as engineers; organizations, such as businesses; and institutions, such as the government, in the control of technology. At the end of each chapter, Volti provides a series of well-thoughtout questions for discussion. Every chapter is well footnoted with …
Toyota
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 423 Street Railways and the Growth ofLos Angeles is a thoughtful, delight fully written work. Moreover, it contains outstanding photographs, superb maps, and other useful illustrations. The publisher contrib uted to a successful project by producing a handsome, oversized volume. When Los Angeles completes the light-rail and subway system presently under construction, this book will require an ex panded epilo…
Toyota
Technical Workers in an Advanced Society
Disappearing through the Skylight
BACONIAN EMPIRISM, COMPUTER ART, AND THE NEW SCIENCE OF CHAOS. AT THE HEART OF HARDISON'S INQUIRY US THE NOTION OF HOLISTIC COMMUNICATIONS - THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MESSAGE AND STATIC IN MODERN CULTURE - WHICH WILL BE MADE TANGIBLE IN THE TEXT ITSELF THROUGH THE USE OF BLACK AND WHITE (AND POSSIBLY COLOUR) ILLUSTRATIONS. SAYS SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE: IF ANYONE QUALIFIES FOR THAT MUCH-ABUSED DESCRIPTION - RENAISSANCE MAN - OB HARDISON DOES ...NO ARE…
Technical Workers in an Advanced Society
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 141 computerized searches that relieve the user of even comprehending their meaning. The reading of full cases is now all too rare. There really is more to the Katsh volume than this broad descrip tion of his general argument suggests. Consider the following thoughts on complex interactions between the material world and the world of ideas: Copyright ... is more than a means for protecting a property interest.…
Society and Technological Change
Technology is a basic feature of all human societies and as such, a great deal can be learned about a society through the study of its technological status achiev ments. Society and Technological Change explores the international, social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions of technology. It illustrates the ramifications of technological change, as well as the forces that produced it
Driving Ambitions
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 419 Smith’s triumph over Pocahontas’s people. Rescued from death by the Native American woman, Smith dazzles the natives with his compass and frightens them with cannon fire. Englishmen, Wright appears to imply, are the knowledgeable enthusiasts; Native American women and men the ignorant technophobes. And yet, if they cared nothing for technology, why did the Native Americans even bother to look at the compass…
Driving Ambitions
Ways of the World
This book has four objectives: to provide a comprehensive history of roads and bridges and the vehicles that have used them; to properly document that history; to explore the development of roads as part of a larger societal system; and to provide a good reference list and literature survey of the world's English-language literature on the history of roads. To achieve these objectives the author has, in his own words, written at a number of level…
Ways of the World
608 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE J. E. Schwartzberg opens a hitherto little-known field of astro nomic and geographic cartography through an important collection of South Asian and especially Indian maps. This is pioneer work, and he admits that the uninitiated will have difficulty in perceiving their cartographic content. They are neither based on surveys nor drawn to any scale transposed from available mathematical-astronomical knowledg…
America Calling
America Calling
424 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940. By Claude S. Fischer. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. Pp. xv+424; illustrations, notes, appendixes, bibliography, in dex. $25.00. In recent years, most sociological studies of technology have at tempted to show how specific technologies have been shaped by socioeconomic conditions. Considerably less fashionable is …
The Petersen Automotive Museum
Le but du Musee Petersen de l'Automobile a Los Angeles n'est pas de decrire le developpement technique de l'automobile, mais plutot son histoire, en mettant en evidence des scenes qui decrivent son utilisation a travers les differentes epoques
The Engineer in History
Political science (29 obras) · History (27 obras) · Law (22 obras) · Sociology (22 obras) · Engineering (19 obras) · Economics (15 obras) · Business (11 obras) · China (11 obras) · Computer Science (11 obras) · Politics (11 obras)