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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 6 page analysis of George Ritzer's The McDonaldization of Society. The writer demonstrates that this book provides an intriguing premise for analyzing certain trends in modern society. Ritzer sees the business philosophy of the fast food restaurant chain 'McDonald's' becoming the standard modus operandi of almost every sphere of business. No additional sources cited.
Page Count:
6 pages (~225 words per page)
File: KE9_99mcds.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
business. The fast food industry uses standardization of procedures and a limited selection to provide cheap meals, relatively "fast." Ritzer sees the
same principles being applied to an ever-increasing number of other areas in modern society, such as the workplace, higher education, and health care. He refers to this process of
standardizing social services as "McDonaldization" because the McDonalds Corporation was the initiator of this mode of business. Ritzer derives a great deal of his inspiration for his theory from
the work of the turn-of-the-century German sociologist Max Weber. Weber characterized modernity as an "iron cage" of rationality. To put it simply, by "iron cage" Weber was using a
neologism for a system that alienates, controls and imprisons its participants. Weber felt that bureaucracies were institutions (or cages) in which the employees were trapped and their basic humanity was
denied. In other words, Weber felt that modernity had placed society in a seamless web of rationalized structures with no way out.
Webers theory of bureaucracy and the processes of rationalization that underlie bureaucracy are central to Ritzers argument. For Weber, bureaucracies were the model of rationalization. In a similar manner, for
Ritzer, the fast food restaurant is the paradigm of McDonaldization. In both cases, there is an organizational model that strives to eliminate all inefficiency, irrationality, uncertainty, and unpredictability. Nevertheless, Ritzer
makes it clear that the two models are not interchangeable. McDonaldization is not just a version of rationalization, but rather an ultra-extreme version of it. Ritzer describes it as "a
quantum leap" in the process of rationalization (33). He states that "Just as Weber fettered over the emerging iron cage of rationality, I foresee a similar iron cage being created
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