George Ritzer’s Mcdonaldization of Society

George Ritzer

He was born on October 14, 1940, an American sociologist, professor, and author who studies globalization, metatheory, patterns of consumption, and modern and postmodern social theory. His most notable contribution to date is his concept of McDonaldization, which draws upon Max Weber’s idea of rationalization through the lens of the fast food industry. In addition to creating his own theories, Ritzer has also written many general sociology books, including Introduction to Sociology (2012) as well as Essentials to Sociology (2014), and modern and postmodern social theory textbooks. Currently, Ritzer is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Ritzer was born in 1940 to a Jewish family in upper Manhattan, New York City. His father and mother were employed as a taxi cab driver and secretary, respectively, in order to support him and his younger brother. Ritzer later described his upbringing as “upper lower class”. When his father contracted a strange illness, speculated to be from his job as a taxi driver, Ritzer’s mother had to break open the family’s piggy bank, where they stored half dollars, in order to provide for the family. Despite dealing with some tough economic times, he never felt deprived relative to others while growing up in a “working-class, multi-ethnic neighborhood”.

Mcdonaldization

The success of fast food chains is used by Ritzer as a metaphor for some general trends characterizing the contemporary  society. We have become a nation driven by concerns for rationality, speed, and efficiency that are so well illustrated by the McDonalds’ style of operation. Food, packaging, and service are designed to move quickly and cheaply through and out of these restaurants, giving customers the most modern eating experience. Speed, convenience, and standardization have replaced the flair of design and creation in cooking, the comfort of relationships in serving, and the variety available in choice.

Ritzer’s idea of McDonaldization is an extension of Max Weber’s classical theory of the rationalization of modern society and culture. Ritzer argues that McDonald’s restaurants have become the better example of current forms of instrumental rationality and its ultimately irrational and harmful consequences on people Ritzer identifies four rationalizing dimensions of McDonald’s that contribute to the process of McDonaldization, claiming that McDonald’s aims to increase:

1. Efficiency – The “McDonald’s model” and therefore the McDonald’s operations follow a predesigned process that leads to a specified end, using productive means. The efficiency of the McDonald’s model has infiltrated other modern day services.    The process of rationalization leads to a society in which a great deal of emphasis is placed on finding the best or optimum means to any given end.Whatever a group of people define as an end, and everything they so define, is to be pursued by attempting to find the best means to achieve the end.
2. Calculability – the quantity of a product with the quality of a product and that “bigger is better”. The “McDonald’s model” is influential in this conception due to providing a lot of food for not that much money. While the end products feed into the connection between the quantity and quality of the product, so does the McDonald’s production process. Throughout the food production, everything is standardized and highly calculated: the size of the beef patty, the amount of french fries per order, and the time spent in a franchise. It could easily be argued that the emphasis on quantifiable measures, on things that can be counted, is the most defining characteristic of a rational society. Instead of even trying, in an increasing number of cases, a rational society seeks to develop a series of quantifiable measures that it takes as it takes place for quality.
3. Predictability – Related to calculability, customers know what to expect from a given producer of goods or services. In a rational society, people want to know what to expect when they enter a given setting or acquire some sort of commodity.They neither want nor expect surprises.They want to know that if they journey to an- other locale, the setting they enter or the commodity they buy will be essentially the same as the setting they entered or product they purchased earlier. Further- more, people want to be sure that what they encounter is much like what they encountered at earlier times. In order to ensure predictability over time and place a rational society must emphasize such things as discipline, order, systemization, formalization, routine, consistency, and methodical operation.
4. Control – McDonald’s restaurants pioneered the idea of highly specialized tasks for all employees to ensure that all human workers are operating at exactly the same level. This is a way to keep a complicated system running smoothly; rules and regulations that make efficiency, calculability, and predictability possible. Rational systems are oriented toward, and structured to expedite, control in a variety of senses.At the most general level, we can say that rational systems are set up to allow for greater control over the uncertainties of life—birth, death, food production and distribution, housing, religious salvation, and many, many others. More specifically, rational systems are oriented to gaining greater control over the major source of uncertainty in social life—other people. Among other things, this means control over subordinates by superiors and control of clients and customers by workers.

Irrationality of Rationality

Although not an inherent part of rationalization, the irrationality of rationality is a seemingly inevitable byproduct of the process. We can think of the irrationality of rationality in several ways. At the most general level it can simply be seen as an overarching label for all the negative effects of rationalization. More specifically, it can be seen as the opposite of rationality, at least in some of its senses.

What is needed is not a less rational society, but greater control over the process of rationalization involving, among other things, efforts to less its irrational consequences.

Expansionism

McDonald’s Model has been adopted by a wide array of businesses. Many McDonaldized businesses have become successful that’s why other businesses are adapting the principles of the fast-food industry to their needs. And even other institutions adapts the same principle too.

Globalization

In Ritzer’s research, globalization refers to the rapidly increasing worldwide integration and interdependence of societies and cultures. He defines it as involving a worldwide diffusion of practices, relations, and forms of social organization and the growth of global consciousness. The concept of “something” vs. “nothing” plays a large part in understanding Ritzer’s Globalization.  For Ritzer, globalization typically leads to consumption of vast quantities of serial social forms that have been centrally conceived and controlled – one McDonald’s hamburger, i.e., one instance of nothing again and again- dominates social life . To better understand globalization, it can be broken down into a few characteristics:

• The beginning of global communication through different media like television and the Internet
• The formation of a “global consciousness

Ritzer quotes that globalization consists of glocalization and grobalization. Grobalization, a term coined by Ritzer himself, refers to “imperialistic ambitions of nations, corporations, organizations, and the like and their desire, indeed need, to impose themselves on various geographic areas”. As opposite to glocalization, grobalization aims to “overwhelm local”. Its ultimate goal is to see profit grow through unilateral homogenization, thus earning its name grobalization. Capitalism and McDonaldization are all parts of grobalization.

Glocalization is a combination of the words “globalization” and “localization” used to describe a product or service that is developed and distributed globally, but is also fashioned to accommodate the user or consumer in a local market, causing the products, or results of glocalization, to vary depending on different locations. The local individuals are able to manipulate their own situation in the world and become creative agents in what products and services are represented in their local environment within the glocalized world. Ritzer further explains Glocalization as a relatively benign process that is closest to the “something” end of things.

Something vs. nothing

According to Ritzer, “Something” is a locally conceived and controlled social form that is comparatively rich in distinctive substantive content. It also describes things as being fairly unusual. “Nothing” is “a social form that is generally centrally conceived, controlled and comparatively devoid of distinctive substantive content” “Nothing” usually aims at the standardized and homogenous, while “something” refers to things that are personal or have local flavor. Examples of “nothing” are McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, credit cards, and the Internet. Examples of “something” are local sandwich shops, local hardware stores, family arts and crafts places, or a local breakfast cafe. Ritzer believes that things that embody the “nothing” component of this dichotomy are taking over and pushing “something” out of society. He explains the advantages and disadvantages of both “something” and “nothing” in The McDonaldization of Society.