McDonaldization Of Society
VISIONS OF SOCIETY:
The Bureaucratization of Society
43
The McDonaldization of Society
GEORGE RITZER
The success of fast food chains is used by Ritzer as a metaphor for some general trends characterizing contemporary American 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. McDonaldization has become so pervasive that one can travel to nearly any city or town in America and find familiar chain-style restaurants, shops, hotels, and other avenues for commercial exchange.
This has fostered the homogenization of American culture and life, streamlined along a set of rational, efficient, and impersonal principles. How has the McDonaldization phenomenon affected your life? What types of commercial exchanges are affected by this process?
What are the benefits of this for society? What are some of the detriments that you see? wide-ranging process of rationalization is occurring across American society and is having an increasingly powerful impact in many other parts of the world. It encompasses such disparate phenomena as fast-food restaurants,TV dinners, packaged tours, industrial robots, plea bargaining, and openheart surgery on an assembly-line basis. As widespread and as important as these developments are, it is clear that we have barely begun a process that promises even more extraordinary changes (e.g. genetic engineering) in the years to come.
We can think of rationalization as a historical process and rationality as the end result of that development. As a historical process, rationalization has distinctive roots in the
The Bureaucratization of Society
43
The McDonaldization of Society
GEORGE RITZER
The success of fast food chains is used by Ritzer as a metaphor for some general trends characterizing contemporary American 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. McDonaldization has become so pervasive that one can travel to nearly any city or town in America and find familiar chain-style restaurants, shops, hotels, and other avenues for commercial exchange.
This has fostered the homogenization of American culture and life, streamlined along a set of rational, efficient, and impersonal principles. How has the McDonaldization phenomenon affected your life? What types of commercial exchanges are affected by this process?
What are the benefits of this for society? What are some of the detriments that you see? wide-ranging process of rationalization is occurring across American society and is having an increasingly powerful impact in many other parts of the world. It encompasses such disparate phenomena as fast-food restaurants,TV dinners, packaged tours, industrial robots, plea bargaining, and openheart surgery on an assembly-line basis. As widespread and as important as these developments are, it is clear that we have barely begun a process that promises even more extraordinary changes (e.g. genetic engineering) in the years to come.
We can think of rationalization as a historical process and rationality as the end result of that development. As a historical process, rationalization has distinctive roots in the