Warning: McDonaldization (Part~1)

Survival under McDonaldization

What is the word “McDonaldization” comes from?

“McDonaldization” was invented by sociologist George Ritzer, who wrote the book The McDonaldization of Society. McDonaldization is a re-conceptualization of rationalization, or moving from traditional to rational modes of thought, and scientific management. Where Maximilian Weber (a German political economist and sociologist.) used the model of the bureaucracy to represent the direction of this changing society, Ritzer sees the fast-food restaurant as having become a more representative paradigm contemporarily.

...McDonaldization,...is the process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as of the rest of the world. (Ritzer, 1993:1)

Alternatively, McDonaldization can refer to the replacement of traditional restaurants with McDonald's. Ritzer highlighted four primary components of McDonaldization: efficiency, calculability, control and predictability.

Characteristics of McDonaldization.

Efficiency - choosing the optimum means to a given end. Efficiency is advantageous to consumers who can obtain what they need more quickly and with less effort. Workers can perform their tasks more rapidly and easily. Managers and owners gain because work gets done and because customers are served at higher efficiency. McDonaldization is efficient because everything is done quickly and easily.

Calculability - the ability to produce and obtain large amounts of things very rapidly. Customers in fast-food restaurants get a lot of food quickly, while the managers and owner get a great deal of work from their employees and the work is done speedily. The problem is the decrease of quality. Quantification is linked to the creation of non-human technologies that perform tasks in the given amount of time or make products of a given weight or size.

        "(this) involves an emphasis on things that can be calculated, counted, quantified. Quantification refers to a tendency to emphasize quantity rather than quality. This leads to a sense that quality is equal to certain, usually (but not always) large quantities of things." (Ritzer 1994:142)

Control - McDonaldization exerts an increasing control over both employees and customers. The employees have McDonald universities and handbooks to tell or to guide them exactly how to look and what to say. They standardized and uniform employees. The customer is told what to do by having to pick up their own food at the register and clean up after them.

Predictability - knowing exactly what you are going to get. Franchising plays on predictability to sell its products.