McDOnaldization

A detailed Summary of McDOnaldization


Review of Ritzer's The McDonaldization of Society

Sociologist George Ritzer sees the thousands of McDonalds restaurants that dot the U.S. landscape, and increasingly, the world. They provide a much greater significance than just the convenience of fast hamburgers and french fries. He created the term the McDonaldization of society to refer to the increasing rationalization of the routine tasks of everyday life.

Ritzer emphasizes that "McDonaldization" does not refer just to the robot-like assembly of food. Rather, this process, occurring throughout society, is converting our lives. Shopping malls are controlled environments of accepted design, logo, colors, and opening and closing hours. Travel agencies haul middle-class Americans to ten European capitals in fourteen days, each visitor encountering precisely the same hotels, restaurants, and other predictable settings. No one need fear meeting a "real" native. USA Today generates the same bland, instant news, in brief, unanalytical pieces that can be read amid gulps of the McShake or McBurger.

Ritzer vindicates that these things are not necessarily bad. He focuses on the four foundations of McDonaldization: efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control


ins that the main reason that this is done is because "people are the great source of uncertainty, unpredictability, and inefficiency in any rationalizing system." By increasing control, fast food restaurants maintain a better control over the entire organization. Employees do not have to think about their job, for it has become repetitive.

ect of McDonaldization that makes fast food companies successful is calculability. For example, McDonald's put a quantitative emphasis on the amount of food you are about to receive. They label things "Quarter Pounder" and "Big Mac". Ritzer explains that the use of these adjectives suggests to the consumer that they are getting the most amount of food for their money. Thirdly, customers rely on fast food chains for predictability. Customers rely on fast food chains to be the same food and service. For example, a customer expects that a McDonald's Chicken Fajita be the same as the McDonald's across town, or in another state. The last aspect that Ritzer uses to explain McDonaldization is control. The fast food industry uses nonhuman technology in place of human technology. They have automatic soft drink machines, french fry machines that rings and lifts the fries out automatically, and preprogrammed cash registers that eliminate the ne

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Approximate Word count = 869
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Miscellaneous

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