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What Is McDonaldization?
Efficiency
Calculability
Predictability
Control
Overview
McDonaldization is the term invented by George Ritzer to describe a sociological phenomenom that is happening in our society. You may think it started with Ray Kroc in the 1950's when he bought his first hamburger restaurant, but it's origins were actually much earlier than that. In fact, Henry Ford was the first McDonaldization pioneer with his vision of an assembly line for improving the production of automobiles. His revolutionary idea dramatically changed how many automobiles could be produced and was very efficient.
In essence, McDonaldization is the process of rationalization, albiet taken to extreme levels. Rationalization is a sociological term that simply means the substitution of logically consistent rules for traditional (or illogical) rules. One of the fundamental aspects of McDonaldization is that almost any task can (and should) be rationalized.
The process of McDonaldization takes a task and breaks it down into smaller tasks. This is repeated until all tasks have been broken down to the smallest possible level. The resulting tasks are then rationalized to find the single most efficient method for completing each task. All other methods are then deemed inefficient and discarded.
The result is an efficient, logical sequence of methods that can be completed the same way every time to produce the desired outcome. The outcome is predictable. All aspects of the process are easily controlled. Additionally, quantity (or calculability) becomes the measurement of good performance.
By now, you might be thinking that this all sounds pretty good. After all, being more efficient is a good thing. Controlled, consistent and measurable outcomes also sound good. So, what's the problem?
It turns out that over-rationalizing a process in this manner has an unexpected side effect. It's called irrationality. In a sociological context that simply means that a rationalized system may result in events or outcomes that were neither anticipated or desired, and in fact, may not be so good.
Take the example of the McDonald's chain of restaurants. Where is the irrationality? The premise of fast food often turns out to be just the opposite - long waits in lines. Fast food is not necessarily good food - in fact, McDonald's food is extremely unhealthy and the taste is average and bland. The system of efficiently producing and distributing their food has some other consequences, namely millions of tons of trash each year (disposability) and a food cultivation system of questionable ethics.
According to Ritzer, the four main dimensions of McDonaldization are:
• Efficiency - The optimum method of completing a task. The rational determination of the best mode of production. Individuality is not allowed.
• Calculability - Assessment of outcomes based on quantifiable rather than subjective criteria. In other words, quantity over quality. They sell the Big Mac, not the Good Mac.
• Predictability - The production process is organized to guarantee uniformity of product and standardized outcomes. All shopping malls begin to look the same and all highway exits have the same assortment of businesses.
• Control - The substitution of more predictable non-human labor for human labor, either through automation or the deskilling of the work force.
There are other dimensions of McDonaldization that Ritzer didn't include with the main four, but are worthy enough for prime attention. They are:
• Irrationality - A side effect of over-rationalized systems. Ritzer himself hints that this is the fifth dimension of McDonaldization. An example of this could be workers on an assembly line that are hired and trained to perform a single highly rationalized task. Although this may be a very efficient method of operating a business, an irrationality that is spawned can be worker burnout.
• Deskilling - A work force with the minimum abilities possible to complete simple focused tasks. This means that they can be quickly and cheaply trained and are easily replaceable.
• Consumer Workers - One of the sneakiest things about McDonaldization is how consumers get tricked into becoming unpaid employees. They do the work that was traditionally performed by the company. The prime example of this is diners who bus their own tables at the fast food restaurant. They dutifully carry their trash to friendly receptacles marked "thank you." (The extreme rationalization of this is the drive-thru; consumers take their trash with them!) Other examples are many and include: ATM's, salad bars, automated telephone menus, and pumping gas.
The McDonaldization of Society An Investigation Into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life
by George Ritzer
UK publication details: Published by Sage Publications Inc (USA) Pine Forge Press Revised Ed (March 2000) Price �16.99 (paperback) isbn: 0761986286 430 pages
US publication details: Published by Pine Forge Press February 2000 Price $25.95 (paperback, 3rd edition) isbn: 0761986286
This book aims to offer "... readers some new insights into the society in which they are in the process of constructing. If they are as alarmed as I am by the dangers posed by McDonaldization, perhaps they can do what Weber thought virtually impossible - act to reverse the trend toward McDonaldization. Although I do not think such a reversal is possible, or even necassarily desirable, I do think that there are steps that people can take to ameliorate the problems, to humanize a McDonaldized society. It is hoped that this book will not only inform, but also serve as a warning, and perhaps most important, point the reader in directions that can help make the "iron cage of McDonaldization" a more human setting in which to work and live."
"...McDonald's represents a monumentally important development and the process that it has helped spawn, McDonaldization, is engulfing more and more sectors of society and areas of the world. It has yielded a number of benefits to society, but it also entails a considerable number of costs and risks."
Suggests actions that individuals can take to cope with McDonaldization:
At least once a week, pass up lunch at McDonald's and frequent a local greasy spoon.
To really shake up the clerk at the department store, use cash rather than your credit card.
For your next vacation, go to only one locale and get to know it well.
Go to no movies that have roman numerals after their names.
"Although I have emphasized the irresistibility of McDonaldization throughout this book, my fondest hope is that I am wrong. Indeed, a major motivation behind this book is to alert readers to the dangers of McDonaldization and to motivate them to act to stem its tide. I hope that we are able to resist McDonaldization and can create instead a more reasonable, more human world."
About the Author... Ritzer is Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, where he has been named Distinguished Scholar-Teacher. His other publications include Frontiers of Social-Theory (Colombia University Press) and Sociology: Experiencing Changing Societies (5th edition) with Kenneth Kammeyer and Norman Yetman.
The McDonaldization of Society 5 is the fifth edition of George Ritzer’s provocative analysis of the forces underlying the global success of McDonald’s. Engaging such diverse themes as space, consumer choice, advertising, and labor practices, Ritzer seeks to identify and explain the particular institutional logics of the company’s business model. The key, Ritzer suggests, is that the McDonald’s model is predicated on a particular set of rationalizing forces, which he identifies as McDonaldization. Specifically, Ritzer identifies such processes as homogeneity, predictability, efficiency, and calculability as the core elements of these McDonaldization processes. These elements endow McDonald’s with a reliability and familiarity that both enforces the iconic status of this brand and appeals to customers throughout the world. It is these qualities that have contributed to McDonald’s success as a global force in addition to the company’s association with Western or American culture.
Yet as much as this analysis foregrounds McDonald’s as a key concept, readers in search of a history or critique of McDonald’s will likely be disappointed, because this is, at heart, a critical analysis of Weberian social theory. Ritzer’s main interest is in rethinking Weber’s classic ideas of rationalization and disenchantment through the lens of McDonaldization. The McDonald’s phenomenon, as Ritzer suggests, provides an excellent contemporary example of the bureaucratic structures of rationalization that Weber identified in the nineteenth century: notably, standardization, routinization, homogenization, dehumanization, and anonymization. Hence, the scope of this book is much larger than simply McDonald’s, as McDonaldization becomes the lens through which many other contemporary social phenomena and other global corporations can be analyzed: American factory systems, housing patterns, shopping malls, health care, entertainment, travel, Ikea, Howard Johnsons, and Starbucks, among many others. In a new concluding discussion Ritzer examines the growth of Starbucks and carefully considers where Starbucks has now assumed the mantle of today’s ultimate symbol of rationalization. He concludes that it has not (at least not yet) but that there is an important convergence of Starbuckization and McDonaldization.
What Ritzer does so convincingly in this book is show the extent to which many of these most ordinary and fundamental aspects of contemporary American life are embedded within a McDonaldizing framework in which structure and system become more important than content. At the same time, Ritzer’s account of the rationalizing logics of the McDonaldization system are fruitful for thinking through the ways in which bureaucratic structures work (or not, in some cases) in today’s hypercommercialized, hyperglobalized world.
Drawing on Weberian ideas about disenchantment that he first broached in earlier work and elaborated more fully in The Globalization of Nothing (Pine Forge Press, 2004), Ritzer extends his analysis through discussion of two, interrelated themes: globalization versus localization, and something versus nothing. According to Ritzer, the homogenizing tendencies of globalization eliminate cultural distinctiveness, which he describes as a loss of meaningfulness or “nothing.” Localizing processes, by contrast, retain and celebrate distinct cultural traditions and values, and hence preserve meaningfulness or “something.” To pursue this line of reasoning, Ritzer sets up a series of contrasts between global/nothing and local/something. For instance, Ritzer juxtaposes McDonald’s and other global fast food chains (“nothing”) with small family diners (“something”), and Disney World (“nothing”) with museums (“something”), and souvenir shops (“nothing”) with shops that sell local handicrafts (“something”).
This discussion of global/local and nothing/something is perhaps the most important and provocative part of Ritzer’s discussion, although the persuasiveness of his analysis will depend on readers’ own perspectives on globalization. Ritzer critically engages with other theorists in global/local debates, especially anthropologists and other scholars who have argued for considering global/local interrelations in more subtle and nuanced ways, most notably with attention to the localness of global processes and the ways in which local actors may remake global entities into locally meaningful phenomena. Because Ritzer’s focus is primarily oriented to structures and processes, he largely overlooks the perspectives and practices of social actors who create their own classificatory systems, a dimension that might complicate his analysis, as his anthropologist interlocutors in particular have suggested. In addition, there is a sense in this analysis that Ritzer’s own personal sensibilities might be informing the otherwise objective analysis. Hence an unresolved question is the extent to which Ritzer’s classifications of “something” and “nothing” are representative of the views of other Americans or are representative of his views.
Yet another point of contention is the seeming rigidity of Ritzer’s binarisms. Although his model acknowledges transitional stages between global and local, and between something and nothing, these stages seem to be structural and not processual. Hence it is unclear the extent to which Ritzer’s model can accommodate dynamic processes of flexibility, uncertainty, and unpredictability. Certainly, Ritzer is suggesting strongly that McDonaldization is successful because it actively eliminates these qualities, but even the culture of McDonald’s itself contains internal paradoxes and ambiguities. At the same time, this approach rests on a particular temporality and directionality that presumes rationalization as its inevitable endpoint. Challenges to these modes are presented as resistance to the structures themselves. Consequently, it is unclear to what extent alternative models that are not directly counterpoised to McDonaldization would fit into this analysis, nor is it clear how the unpredictability of human agency might complicate these ideas. It is also worth considering whether this volume is itself the product of a particular historical intellectual moment and whether recent trends in scholarly theories of globalization have moved theoretical conversations beyond the particular issues contained in this analysis.
These criticisms aside, this is an insightful volume that productively redirects discussions of commercial food systems beyond the expected simplistic and often muck-raking critiques of capitalism and industrial agriculture, and into the realm of thoughtful social analysis. An additional strength is that Ritzer consistently provides clear outlines of the key debates and theorists that he is engaging. He also writes in a clear and compelling manner, making excellent use of rich examples drawn from current American social life. What Ritzer does so persuasively is not only remind readers of the continuing endurance of key issues in social theory, but he also demonstrates that social theory can be accessible and is applicable to the everyday lives of ordinary people. This is a volume that undergraduate students and general readers can engage, as well as scholars.
This volume has always been well-suited for classroom adoption because of its accessibility and engagement with key issues in current social analysis, but this most recent edition is further enriched by the inclusion of supplemental materials for teaching and future research. Pine Forge Press has created an on-line “student study site” where students and their instructors can access a wealth of related materials: discussion questions; an extensive bibliography and links to available published scholarly materials about McDonald’s, McDonaldization, and globalization; Ritzer’s tips for “Resisting McDonaldization”; interviews with the author; an exhaustive list of general web resources about McDonald’s; and a link to the MySpace page for the book, complete with links to the book’s celebrity “friends.” The book also comes with an Instructor’s Resource CD-ROM, although that disk was not available with the copy reviewed here. Collectively, these resources enhance the value of this volume for teaching undergraduates and directing them to materials to help them with their own research. Nevertheless, the inclusion of these materials do highlight a likely unintended irony as readers may ponder the extent to which the new technologies in which this fifth edition are situated make this book a McDonaldized version of itself.
Ultimately, this immensely readable, provocative, and stimulating book will continue to be of interest and importance for scholars of globalization, standardization, bureaucracies, technology, and food studies. It is suitable for undergraduates, graduate students, scholars, and general readers.
The McDonaldization of Society 6 by George Ritzer. California, Pine Forge Press, 2010, 328 pp., £27.99 (paperback), ISBN-10: 1412980127; ISBN-13: 978-1412980128
Ritzer’s sixth edition is a current analysis of a ubiquitous structure he calls “McDonaldization” that leads to the mundane routine, irrational standards, homogenized culture and dehumanization that now invades almost all areas of society worldwide. Ritzer argues that no social system is immune from this fast-food phenomenon that is serving to elevate quantity over quality, fast over slow, and nothing (lacking unique substance) over something (rich in unique substance). Ritzer argues that this system is one of the processes brought on by globalization, shaped by the compression of space and time and leading to a world that is growly increasingly similar (Grobalization). In the book, McDonaldization is used as a tool to analyze suburban housing, online dating, supermarkets, mega churches, health care, shopping malls, entertainment, hotels, etc. While the book was originally published almost 20 years ago, the concept remains especially timely and relevant as McDonaldization threatens to continue its expansion and is more deeply ingrained in the cultures of the world than ever before.
The book is a successful social criticism and is accessible to college students of multiple disciplines, scholars, and the average person through its informal tone and readable style. It provides information about society that could lead to a stimulating debate. The first two chapters provide an introduction to McDonaldization and its past, present and future. Chapters three to six describe the key elements of McDonaldization and focus on many of the seemingly positives and negatives created by this system. Chapter seven and eight discuss the irrationalities caused by McDonaldization. Chapter nine and ten provide a ‘practical’ guide for dealing with McDonaldization and the possibility of a backlash to McDonaldization thereby providing humans to live up to their potential. Even though Ritzer admits that the trend reversal isn’t likely, the book is meant as a successful warning to counteract the surface advantages provided by McDonaldization and makes the reader think about something that has become so embedded in our psyche.
Ritzer states that McDonaldization is primarily composed of four elements that allow for speed, quantity, and expected processes and people management. They are: Efficiency, Calculability, Predictability and Control. These elements are based on the idea of rationality created by the German sociologist Max Weber. Using McDonalds as the example, efficiency refers to getting the customer from hungry to full as quickly as possible. Calculability refers to the impression of getting a lot of food for a small price. Predictability offers the same hamburger anywhere in the world with no surprises. Finally, control provides customer management through lines, limited menus, self-service and measures to keep the visit short. This system offers perceived rational advantages in speed, price, tradition and stability for customers and profit for companies.
McDonaldization provides a product and stream-lined service in society’s just-in-time culture that people have come to rely upon, yet it counter intuitively hurries people even more. Ritzer argues that these seemingly advantageous and rational outcomes and actually quite irrational. These outcomes can create a decrease in product quality, false friendliness, unhappy workers, health and environmental damage, a consumer culture, a homogenized society and dismantled families. These outcomes waste people’s time (10 minute wait at the drive-through), put customers to work (the empty cup and drink station) and aren’t as affordable as one might think ($20 for a fast food family meal is more than what most dinners at home cost). Ritzer states that the only people that these ‘rational’ outcomes benefit are the people pushing them in the first place.
Ritzer encourages perceiving the four elements of Weber’s rational theory not as an “Iron Cage”, but as a “rubber cage” where people can bend the bars effectively choosing which portions of McDonaldization they accept. He offers suggestions on how to limit the negatives effects by creating reasonable alternatives such as: Slow Food, avoiding superstores, avoiding daily routine, and other, as Ritzer admits, often time-consuming techniques. Chapter ten is new to this edition and covers what he calls “deMcDonaldization” or the countertrends to McDonaldization. He believes deMcDonaldization is a possibility and that many of the trends such as Web 2.0 actually fit into both schools of thought. Ebay for example, is both consumer driven yet highly regulated and what Ritzer calls “Sneakerization” or mass-customization in computers, sneakers, etc. is a slight pushback, yet really much more of the same.
With our mobile society, single-parent families and woman increasingly working outside of the home, time is becoming a valuable commodity. People see what our hurried lifestyle does to the individual, family and culture as a whole. It is often upsetting and can make one wish for simpler times when people truly knew their doctor, when travel really immersed you in the place or when families ate together. But just as Ritzer doesn’t believe the McDonaldized society will end, it truly seems as though it won’t. Unless a slower pace becomes more profitable, companies won’t have the incentive to make many changes. His idea of the “rubber cage” allowing for some personal choice seems appropriate, as does his decision to abandon calling this phenomenon
“Starbuckization” since Starbucks is based on McDonald’s system even though it feigns worldliness and social justice. It is still about profit, carbon copied stores, drive-through ease, making the consumer work and predictability/control. Ritzer is quite successful by increasing awareness of the unconscious rules people are following for the benefit of companies.
As for the critique, chapter nine makes one wonder if Ritzer is able to be totally objective in his analysis since he naturally views McDonaldization from the negative perspective. Also, several of Dr. Ritzer’s points are difficult to imagine realistically. The average employed person doesn’t have time or money to follow many of his suggestions such as cooking dinner from scratch, sending their kids to private institutions, knitting clothing, avoiding chain stores or organizing protests. He mentions that McDonaldized companies offer the same product in the same way around the world yet Euro Disney had to make many changes to fit into the local market as did McDonalds in India. Another issue involves the fact that Ritzer suggests avoiding movie sequels yet his book is a sequel of itself. He also suggests staying away from pre-packaged education, yet he sells Instructor’s CD-ROMS for this book. He also argues that it is cheaper to eat at home and which is not always true. Without buying in bulk, that .99 burger would cost more to make at home guaranteed. Lastly, society has been simplifying processes since the beginning of time. Consider an ancient Roman buying pre-caught fish from a town’s market instead of fishing for it himself. The merchant and buyer would be considering many of today’s McDonaldized elements, albeit in a much simpler way.
Unfortunately, education is not immune to McDonaldization as seen by standardize tests, limit student choice and press teachers into unreasonable molds that allow for little flexibility for students with multiple intelligences or interests. With the multiple choice tests (efficiency), quantitative grading (calculability), preset learning objectives (predictability) and regulated activities (control) we see a microcosm of the McDonaldized system. Students are taught to obey and memorize while teachers must follow the almighty clock. The current system of education was created for a time that has long since passed. It was successful in creating workers for assembly lines, but it is not optimal for the globalized world of today that requires people to be flexible, creative, and critical among many other traits. Even higher education falls to this system for fast pace and profit. Professors teach to large auditoriums and don’t know their students. Students have limited choice in their degree plan. Teachers don’t have the time to provide valuable feedback to students. Education leads the student directly from the McDonaldized school into McDonaldized work, leisure, health, family, etc. The quality and purpose of learning suffers in this environment. Seeing learners as submissive recipients of knowledge effectively takes the human contact and fun out of education thereby creating a society that isn’t interested in life-long learning and is more likely to blindly follow the McDonaldized leader.