Technologies of Choice?

Technologies of Choice?
Author: Dorothea Kleine
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2013-01-25
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0262304589

A new framework for assessing the role of information and communication technologies in development that draws on Amartya Sen's capabilities approach. Information and communication technologies (ICTs)—especially the Internet and the mobile phone—have changed the lives of people all over the world. These changes affect not just the affluent populations of income-rich countries but also disadvantaged people in both global North and South, who may use free Internet access in telecenters and public libraries, chat in cybercafes with distant family members, and receive information by text message or email on their mobile phones. Drawing on Amartya Sen's capabilities approach to development—which shifts the focus from economic growth to a more holistic, freedom-based idea of human development—Dorothea Kleine in Technologies of Choice? examines the relationship between ICTs, choice, and development. Kleine proposes a conceptual framework, the Choice Framework, that can be used to analyze the role of technologies in development processes. She applies the Choice Framework to a case study of microentrepreneurs in a rural community in Chile. Kleine combines ethnographic research at the local level with interviews with national policy makers, to contrast the high ambitions of Chile's pioneering ICT policies with the country's complex social and economic realities. She examines three key policies of Chile's groundbreaking Agenda Digital: public access, digital literacy, and an online procurement system. The policy lesson we can learn from Chile's experience, Kleine concludes, is the necessity of measuring ICT policies against a people-centered understanding of development that has individual and collective choice at its heart.

Technologies of Choice?

Technologies of Choice?
Author: Dorothea Kleine
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2013
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0262018209

A new framework for assessing the role of information and communication technologies in development that draws on Amartya Sen's capabilities approach. Information and communication technologies (ICTs)--especially the Internet and the mobile phone--have changed the lives of people all over the world. These changes affect not just the affluent populations of income-rich countries but also disadvantaged people in both global North and South, who may use free Internet access in telecenters and public libraries, chat in cybercafes with distant family members, and receive information by text message or email on their mobile phones. Drawing on Amartya Sen's capabilities approach to development--which shifts the focus from economic growth to a more holistic, freedom-based idea of human development--Dorothea Kleine in Technologies of Choice? examines the relationship between ICTs, choice, and development. Kleine proposes a conceptual framework, the Choice Framework, that can be used to analyze the role of technologies in development processes. She applies the Choice Framework to a case study of microentrepreneurs in a rural community in Chile. Kleine combines ethnographic research at the local level with interviews with national policy makers, to contrast the high ambitions of Chile's pioneering ICT policies with the country's complex social and economic realities. She examines three key policies of Chile's groundbreaking Agenda Digital: public access, digital literacy, and an online procurement system. The policy lesson we can learn from Chile's experience, Kleine concludes, is the necessity of measuring ICT policies against a people-centered understanding of development that has individual and collective choice at its heart.

Children of Choice

Children of Choice
Author: John A. Robertson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 1996-03-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780691036656

In this wide-ranging account of the reproductive technologies currently available, John Robertson goes to the heart of issues that confront increasing numbers of people - single individuals or couples, donors or surrogates, gays or heterosexuals - who seek to redefine family, parenthood, the experience of pregnancy, and life itself.

Technological Choices

Technological Choices
Author: Pierre Lemonnier
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2013-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134523068

Technological Choices applies the critical tools of archaeology to the subject of technology and its impact on humankind throughout the ages. An examination of the challenges technological innovations present to various cultures, Technological Choices asserts that in any society, such choices are made on the basis of cultural values and social relations, rather than on the inherent benefits in technology itself. Of course, this revolutionary viewpoint has critical implications for contemporary Western societies. Based on case studies covering a wide range of chronologies and geographies, Technological Choices moves rapidly from Neolithic Europe to the modern industrial age, stopping on the way to examine the tribes of Papua, New Guinea, rural Indian and North African societies as well as several European peasant communities. The techniques studied range from the manufacture of stone implements to the development of high-tech transportation devices. With its breadth of subject matter and multidisciplinary approach, Technological Choices offers new insight into the interrelationship between technology and society. Also unprecedented is the book's emphasis on the functional aspects of material culture.

Technology Choice

Technology Choice
Author: Kelvin W Willoughby
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2019-07-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000314162

This book attempts to provide a theoretical framework for answering difficult questions evoked by the concept of technology choice primarily by conducting a review of the Appropriate Technology movement and its ideas and experiments.

Technology and Choice

Technology and Choice
Author: Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette
Publisher:
Total Pages: 360
Release: 1991
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Innovation - the imaginative attempt to introduce something new or to solve some problem - smashes routine and demands choice, even if only the choice to retain the status quo. This collection of fourteen essays provides a spectrum of historical perspectives on how, when, or why, individuals, societies, governments, and industries have made choices regarding the use of technologies. Through historical accounts that span centuries and national boundaries, exploring the complexity of a nuclear power plant and the apparent simplicity of an electrical plug, the contributors to this volume dramatically illustrate the push and pull between technology and society. General topics addressed include: Regulation of private industry Social acceptance of commercial innovation Negative perceptions of the "Technological Age" Cultural and artistic features of technology Provocative and accessible, this collection will serve both students and faculty in history, sociology, and public policy, as well as in history and philosophy of science and technology. These essays were originally published in the journal Technology and Culture

Choosing Down Syndrome

Choosing Down Syndrome
Author: Chris Kaposy
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2022-08-09
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0262546248

An argument that more people should have children with Down syndrome, written from a pro-choice, disability-positive perspective. The rate at which parents choose to terminate a pregnancy when prenatal tests indicate that the fetus has Down syndrome is between 60 and 90 percent. In Choosing Down Syndrome, Chris Kaposy offers a carefully reasoned ethical argument in favor of choosing to have such a child. Arguing from a pro-choice, disability-positive perspective, Kaposy makes the case that there is a common social bias against cognitive disability that influences decisions about prenatal testing and terminating pregnancies, and that more people should resist this bias by having children with Down syndrome. Drawing on accounts by parents of children with Down syndrome, and arguing for their objectivity, Kaposy finds that these parents see themselves and their families as having benefitted from having a child with Down syndrome. To counter those who might characterize these accounts as based on self-deception or expressing adaptive preference, Kaposy cites supporting evidence, including divorce rates and observational studies showing that families including children with Down syndrome typically function well. Himself the father of a child with Down syndrome, Kaposy argues that cognitive disability associated with Down syndrome does not lead to diminished well-being. He argues further that parental expectations are influenced by neoliberal ideologies that unduly focus on the supposed diminished economic potential of a person with Down syndrome. Kaposy does not advocate restricting access to abortion or prenatal testing for Down syndrome, and he does not argue that it is ethically mandatory in all cases to give birth to a child with Down syndrome. People should be free to make important decisions based on their values. Kaposy's argument shows that it may be consistent with their values to welcome a child with Down syndrome into the family.

Technology Choices

Technology Choices
Author: Diane E. Bailey
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2015-01-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0262028425

An analysis of the occupational factors that shape the technology choices made by people who perform the same type of work. Why do people who perform largely the same type of work make different technology choices in the workplace? An automotive design engineer working in India, for example, finds advanced information and communication technologies essential, allowing him to work with far-flung colleagues; a structural engineer in California relies more on paper-based technologies for her everyday work; and a software engineer in Silicon Valley operates on multiple digital levels simultaneously all day, continuing after hours on a company-supplied home computer and network connection. In Technology Choices, Diane Bailey and Paul Leonardi argue that occupational factors—rather than personal preference or purely technological concerns—strongly shape workers' technology choices. Drawing on extensive field work—a decade's worth of observations and interviews in seven engineering firms in eight countries—Bailey and Leonardi challenge the traditional views of technology choices: technological determinism and social constructivism. Their innovative occupational perspective allows them to explore how external forces shape ideas, beliefs, and norms in ways that steer individuals to particular technology choices—albeit in somewhat predictable and generalizable ways. They examine three relationships at the heart of technology choices: human to technology, technology to technology, and human to human. An occupational perspective, they argue, helps us not only to understand past technology choices, but also to predict future ones.

Technology Choice

Technology Choice
Author: Kelvin W. Willoughby
Publisher:
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2019-09-13
Genre: Appropriate technology
ISBN: 9780367289690

This book attempts to provide a theoretical framework for answering difficult questions evoked by the concept of technology choice primarily by conducting a review of the Appropriate Technology movement and its ideas and experiments.

The Capability Approach, Technology and Design

The Capability Approach, Technology and Design
Author: Ilse Oosterlaken
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2012-03-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 940073879X

The capability approach of Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen places human capabilities at the centre stage of discussions about justice, equality, development and the quality of life. It rejects too much emphasis on mere preference satisfaction or resource provision and highlights the importance of human agency and freedom. This approach has already significantly influenced different fields of application, such as economics and development studies. Only recently have scholars started to explore its relevance for and application to the area of technology and design, which can be crucial factors in the expansion of human capabilities. How does technology influence human capabilities? What difference could a capability approach make to policies and practices of applying ICT in development processes in the South? How can we criticize and improve the design of technology from the perspective of the capability approach? The authors of this volume explore the implications of the capability approach for technology & design and together create the first volume on this emerging topic.