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Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on April 9, 2008
Enterprise and Society 2008 9(2):372-374; doi:10.1093/es/khn038
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org.

Robert Friedel. A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium

Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007. x + 588 pp. ISBN 978-0-262-06262-6, $39.95

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

The term "technology" is notoriously ambiguous, but Robert Friedel begins this well-organized, informative, and elegantly written book by providing his own definition: the invention or adoption of "tools, instruments, machines, structures and the like" (1). He also states his basic thesis: that over the last thousand years there has emerged in the West a "culture of improvement," which takes it as axiomatic that technological innovation is beneficial to society, and that the rate of technological change has accelerated over . . . [Full Text of this Article]

David J. Sturdy

University of Ulster


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