Some 20 years after writing The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul realized how the totalistic dimensions of our modern technological milieu required an additional treatment of the topic. Writing amidst the rise of books in the 1970s on pollution, over-population, and environmental degradation, Ellul found it necessary, once again, to write about the global presence of technology and its far-reaching effects. The Technological System represents a new stage in Ellul’s research. Previously he studied technological society as such; in this book he approaches the topic from a systems perspective wherein he identifies the characteristics of technological phenomena and technological progress in light of system theory. This leads to an entirely new approach to what constitutes the most important event of our society which has decisive bearing on the future of our world. Ellul’s analysis touches on all aspects of modern life, not just those of a scientific or technological order. In the end, readers are compelled to formulate their own opinions and make their own decisions regarding the way a technique-based value system affects every level of human life.

This volume consitutes a summary of several years' multi-disciplinary research by a group of Swedish researchers. The project 'Sweden's Technological Systems and Future Development Potential' was initiated by the Swedish National Board for Industrial and Technical Development (NUTEK) and has been carried out at the Department of Industrial Management and Economics at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, the Research Policy Institute at the University of Lund, the Industrial Institute for Economic and Social Research (lUI) in Stockholm, and the Department of Industrial Economics and Management at the Royal Insitute of Technology, Stockholm, under the direction of Bo Carlsson, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. The project group decided early on to focus fIrst on the technological system for factory automation - a relatively mature system of great importance to Swedish industry and in which Sweden has reached a leading position internationally - and then to shift the attention to other systems in various stages of development and with varying Swedish strength. The work on factory automation resulted in numerous papers and publications, summarized in a volume published in 1995 (Technological Systems and Economic Performance: The Case of Factory Automation, ed. Bo Carlsson. Dordrecht.

"The impact of technology on society is clear and unmistakeable. The influence of society on technology is more subtle. The 13 essays in this book have been written by a diverse group of scholars united by a common interest in creating a new field - the sociology of technology. They draw on a wide array of case studies - from cooking stoves to missile systems, from 15th-century Portugal to today's Al labs - to outline an original research program based on a synthesis of ideas from the social studies of science and the history of technology. Together they affirm the need for a study of technology that gives equal weight to technical, social, economic, and political questions"--Back cover.

In 1987 the Swedish National Board for Technical Development (STU, later becoming the Swedish National Board for Industrial and Technical Development, NUTEK) initiated a study of Sweden's Technological Systems and Future Development Potential. A comprehensive, interdisciplinary study was envisioned, yielding not only useful insight but also a permanent competence base for future analyses of technological systems and technology policy in Sweden. Three leading Swedish research institutes were invited to participate: the Industrial Institute for Economic and Social Research in Stockholm, the Department ofIndustrial Management and Economics at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, and the Research Policy Institute at the University of Lund. I was invited to direct the project. The project group decided to focus initially on a particular technological system, namely factory automation, to be followed by similar studies of other systems. Numerous publications have resulted from the project thus far. The current volume represents a summary of our work on factory automation. It consists of several original essays and of some previously published papers which have been edited, in some cases substantially, in order to form a comprehensive and coherent picture of a technological system. To our knowledge, this is the first in-depth analysis of a technological system designed as a component of a systematic study of technological systems more generally. At the time of this writing, three further studies on electronics and computers, pharmaceuticals, and powder technology are under way, to be published in a later volume.

As insightful and wise today as it was when originally published in 1954, Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society has become a classic in its field, laying the groundwork for all other studies of technology and society that have followed. Ellul offers a penetrating analysis of our technological civilization, showing how technology—which began innocuously enough as a servant of humankind—threatens to overthrow humanity itself in its ongoing creation of an environment that meets its own ends. No conversation about the dangers of technology and its unavoidable effects on society can begin without a careful reading of this book. "A magnificent book . . . He goes through one human activity after another and shows how it has been technicized, rendered efficient, and diminished in the process.”—Harper's “One of the most important books of the second half of the twentieth-century. In it, Jacques Ellul convincingly demonstrates that technology, which we continue to conceptualize as the servant of man, will overthrow everything that prevents the internal logic of its development, including humanity itself—unless we take necessary steps to move human society out of the environment that 'technique' is creating to meet its own needs.”—The Nation “A description of the way in which technology has become completely autonomous and is in the process of taking over the traditional values of every society without exception, subverting and suppressing these values to produce at last a monolithic world culture in which all non-technological difference and variety are mere appearance.”—Los Angeles Free Press

This volume provides an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the nature and role of technological change in a rapidly evolving arena of economic activity that can be loosely referred to as the bio industries. These include biomedical industries that deliver goods and services used in health care, including those based on genetic engineering, as well as applications of biotechnology in other industries such as agriculture, food production and the forest industries. This volume seeks to identify and address sets of conceptual and methodological issues in analyzing innovation systems, particularly as regards the delimitation of relevant systems. The book makes an in-depth comparison of the biomedical clusters in Sweden and Ohio. It also sheds light on the emergence of new science-based technological systems.

"There are many people today who see that modern society is heading toward disaster in one form or another, and who moreover recognize technology as the common thread linking the principal dangers that hang over us... The purpose of this book is to show people how to begin thinking in practical, grand-strategic terms about what must be done in order to get our society off the road to destruction that it is now on." --from the Preface In Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How, Kaczynski argues why the rational prediction and control of the development of society is impossible while expounding on the existence of a process fundamental to technological growth that inevitably leads to disaster: a universal process akin to biological natural selection operating autonomously on all dynamic systems and determining the long-term outcome of all significant social developments. Taking a highly logical, fact-based, and intellectually rigorous approach, Kaczynski seamlessly systematizes a vast breadth of knowledge and elegantly reconciles the social sciences with biology to illustrate how technological growth in and of itself necessarily leads to disastrous disruption of global biological systems. Together with this new understanding of social and biological change, and by way of an extensive examination of the dynamics of social movements, Kaczynski argues why there is only one route available to avoid the disaster that technological growth entails: a revolution against technology and industrial society. Through critical and comprehensive analysis of the principles of social revolutions and by carefully developing an exacting theory of successful revolution, Kaczynski offers a practical, rational, and realistic guide for preventing the fast-approaching technology-induced catastrophe. This new second edition (2020) contains various updates and improvements over the first edition (2016), including two new appendices.

Enterprise Systems have been used for many years to integrate technology with the management of an organization but rapid technological disruptions are now creating new challenges and opportunities that require urgent consideration. This book reappraises the implementation and management of Enterprise Systems in the digital age and investigates the vital link between business processes, information technology and the Internet for an organization’s competitive advantage and success. This book primarily focuses on the implementation, operation, management and integration of Enterprise Systems with fastemerging disruptive technologies such as blockchains, big data, cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, data mining and data analytics. These disruptive technologies are now becoming mainstream and the book proposes several innovations that organizations need to adopt to remain competitive within this rapidly changing landscape. In addition, it examines Enterprise Systems, their components, architecture, and applications and enlightens readers on the benefits and shortcomings of implementing them. This book contains primary research on organizations, case studies, and benchmarks ERP implementation against international best practice.

This important book addresses how long term and large scale shifts from one socio-technical system to another come about, using insights from evolutionary economics, sociology of technology and innovation studies. These major changes involve not just technological changes, but also changes in markets, regulation, culture, industrial networks and infrastructure. The book develops a multi-level perspective, arguing that transitions take place through the alignment of multiple processes at three levels: niche, regime and landscape. This perspective is illustrated by detailed historical case studies: the transition from sailing ships to steamships, the transition from horse-and-carriage to automobiles and the transition from propeller-piston engine aircraft to turbojets. This book will be of great interest to researchers in innovation studies, evolutionary economics, sociology of technology and environmental studies. It will also be useful for policy makers involved in long-term sustainability and systems transitions issues.

Large technological systems, such as seaports, nuclear power stations, wind farms and natural gas extraction, provide vital functions for society. And yet these large technological systems have an impact on different stakeholder groups in both positive and negative ways. This book defines responsible innovation and describes how both the innovation process and the resulting innovation outcome can be designed, created and implemented in a way that respects the various stakeholder groups involved and affected by the system. Taking a case-based approach, a number of large technological systems are profiled, including hydraulic engineering, nuclear energy, smart metering, and wind power. The values of each of the stakeholder groups, and the costs and benefits of the systems presented, are analysed. The book concludes by combining these insights to provide a framework for how responsible innovation of large technological systems can be implemented in practice. The book will be of particular interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers in technology and innovation management, and corporate governance, CSR and business ethics.