Economies of expertise : knowledge and skill transfer in classical Greece

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract
How did 4th-century autocrats like Philip II of Macedon (or Mausolus of Caria, etc.) import expertise from Greek city-states? The evidence available to us indicates they did do this----deliberately and quickly----and so the mystery becomes: how? It is particularly mysterious in light of modern studies that show substantive expertise transfer to be very challenging (see, for instance, the field of development economics). This dissertation offers an answer to this problem: the new capacity of states for expertise transfer was made possible by new frameworks for understanding expertise, developed mainly at Athens (for instance, in the works of Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle), but disseminated to Greek speaking autocrats over the course of the 4th-century. These new accounts----centered on notions like technē, epistēmē, and empeiria----opened up new possibilities for 4th-century monarchs, allowing them to pinpoint technical fields they wished to target, capture, and recreate (something impossible in absence of an agreed upon, well- developed language of expertise). Plugging into a Greek world of high specialization and expert mobility, opportunists like Philip were thus able to rapidly develop state capacity in fields like land and sea warfare, siege engineering, fortification building, and fiscal administration, allowing them to compete with, and eventually dominate, the Greek city-states.

Description

Type of resource text
Form electronic; electronic resource; remote
Extent 1 online resource.
Publication date 2015
Issuance monographic
Language English

Creators/Contributors

Associated with Pyzyk, Mark
Associated with Stanford University, Department of Classics.
Primary advisor Ober, Josiah
Thesis advisor Ober, Josiah
Thesis advisor Morris, Ian
Thesis advisor Netz, Reviel
Advisor Morris, Ian
Advisor Netz, Reviel

Subjects

Genre Theses

Bibliographic information

Statement of responsibility Mark Pyzyk.
Note Submitted to the Department of Classics.
Thesis Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2015.
Location electronic resource

Access conditions

Copyright
© 2015 by Marko Alexander Pyzyk
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).

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