Week Three: Does Ritzer's Theory Of McDonaldization Still Ap
Week Threedoes Ritzers Theory Of Macdonaldization Still Apply As A Gl
Week Three does Ritzer's theory of MacDonaldization still apply as a global theory with global consequences or is it now outdated? Please explain. (see Module 2) Does modernization necessarily mean democratization? Please explain. Which of the comparisons in the Foreign Affairs article on the Arab Spring and its aftermath are best compared to the examples about democratization and backlash (repressive) results in other societies do you think was most convincing? Please explain the reasons for your choice: Italy France Germany The Individual in Modern Society Reading/Learning Resources Module 2: The Individual in Modern Society In this module we present a brief history of modern society and describe how the development of the modern world has had an impact on the individual in society.
We begin by discussing how society's movement from small agrarian villages to urban centers changed the way people interact within society—especially through their work roles. In our discussion we will briefly examine how Karl Marx and Max Weber defined this era, but we'll spend most of our time investigating how modern systems affect our lives today. Most of our discussion of modern systems will focus on George Ritzer's theory of the McDonaldization of society. Ritzer proposes that the efficient, predictable, calculable, and highly controlled system for delivering fast food to customers—first and most notably exhibited in our society by McDonald's restaurants—has become a system that is now pervasive all through our lives, from our schooling to our medical care.
Introduction Our exploration of the individual in society begins with the individual in modern times. Sociologically, modern times began in the second half of the eighteenth century. This was a significant era in the Western world (specifically, western Europe) because it marks the beginning of a social shift from an agrarian-based society to an industrial one. The era was also known for a greater focus on rapid social progress, rational thought, and institutional organization. By the beginning of the twentieth century, "modernism" became a movement that affected social order, art, literature, and other aspects of Western culture.
The changes that occurred between the late 1700s and the early 1900s defined some of the greatest changes in social thought, interaction, and roles in Western history. The impact of this era can still be felt today, with certain aspects of modern society still in existence. This module will explore some of the aspects of the modern era, how the remnants of modernism are still prevalent today, and how the individual is affected by the highly rational modern world. Modernity: A Historical Perspective As the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth century, the individual increasingly worked in industrial jobs, moving away from rural communities and into new and growing urban centers. Roles during agrarian times were very different than in industrial times.
Agrarian work roles were personal, often creative, and contributed directly to the local community. In agrarian society individuals contributed to a farm economy with jobs that directly contributed to daily life through such activities as growing crops, milling flour, weaving cloth, or making horseshoes. Additional craftsmen jobs came out of the era, from stonecutting to woodworking. Craftsmen jobs (from milling to metalworking) were generally equal in status and of equal importance to the function of an agrarian village. This lifestyle allowed individuals to be creative contributors to their village (and, therefore, their world) through their work.
As society became more industrialized and urbanized, roles changed. Work roles became more dehumanized and more bureaucratized. What does this mean? In order for society to function in an urban, industrial world, job roles had to become more organized and structured. For example, a factory is comprised of machine operators, packers, sanitation workers, secretaries, book keepers, auditors, managers, executives, and so on.
In industrialized worksites, workers are organized rationally and contribute at different levels of the workplace. Pay differs depending on the position, and as a result status differs. Unlike agrarian work life, industrial work life is structured from the top down and is deeply reliant on profits and efficiency. This lifestyle, which became increasingly common in the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, was considerably different than the agrarian lifestyle that preceded it. Individuals lost the personal connection between work, life, and community, and alienation became more common.
Individuals became commodities in the industrialized world along with the other products that contributed to the industrial process. This change affected the great thinkers, activists, and artists of the era, thus fueling the modernist movement. Modernity and Progress The age of enlightenment was a great era of reason and scientific study that occurred in eighteenth-century Europe. This era ushered in a greater emphasis on the study and classification of nature, the rise of democracy and democratic movements (in the U.S. and France), and a general trend toward reason and away from superstition and mysticism. In the modern era that followed, scientific findings, experimentation, and reason led to great progress.
In a rational sense, the progress of this early industrial era was profound. Production and the sharing of goods and knowledge increased significantly over the previous era. Also, the establishment of institutions allowed individuals to become better educated or receive mass-produced goods more efficiently and effectively. This progress benefited many individuals, especially those at the top of the system who were able to benefit from the industrial and economic growth of the era and the wealth that came with it. This progress was not beneficial to all, however, and some found the new industrial system to be oppressive to those at the bottom of the new socioeconomic ladder.
During the nineteenth century, then, two men began to analyze the negative affects of industrial changes on the modern world: both were German and both were observers of social economics. These men were Karl Marx (1818–1883) Marx was the first economic writer to discuss the social impact of the changing times. Marx believed that humans were social beings who needed to bond with society through their work. As society industrialized, the individual became more and more alienated from society through his work (Marx, 1963).
Unlike agrarian times, work no longer was a creative or social outlet for people. Industrial work commoditized workers, making them less human and more machine-like. Their output and production became more important than their humanity. Additionally, the industrialized worker lost power and status through his work. Unlike previous times when the worker made an individual contribution to his community, workers know were controlled and manipulated by those who controlled the means of production.
This dehumanized workers, placing them in service to the objects they produced, alienating them further from community and family bonds. Max Weber (1864–1920) Weber began his career focused on the industrialization of Germany in the late 1800s and changes in the agrarian economics of the earlier part of that century. One of Weber's observations is how industrialization led society to a state of rationalization—that is, a focus on efficiency, precision, and calculability. Society no longer functioned based on the everyday cooperation of a community through the trade of craftsmen and farmers; society now functioned through bureaucratic organization. Weber (1921/1968) stated that [from] a purely technical point of view, a bureaucracy is capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency, and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings.
It is superior to any other form in precision, in stability, in the stringency of its discipline, and in its reliability. It thus makes possible a particularly high degree of calculability of results for the heads of the organization and for those acting in relation to it. It is finally superior both in intensive efficiency and in the scope of its operations and is formally capable of application to all kinds of administrative tasks (p. 223). In other words, when mass production is the ultimate goal, rational systems that emphasize efficiency, precision, and control over personal creativity will best achieve that goal.
These systems are designed to benefit the authorities at the top, in control of production, but some might say that they also benefit the masses by providing access to affordable products and improved technology. But, at what price? Weber states that the rationalized systems that allow for affordable goods and easy access to progress also work to hold us in a rationalized "iron cage." Weber defined this iron cage as a series of interconnected structures, which if fully rationalized, would ground and guide virtually all human interaction. George Ritzer summarizes Weber's concept further. It is one in which people move seamlessly from "one rationalized system to another...from educational institutions to rationalized workplaces, from rationalized recreational settings to rationalized homes. (Ritzer, 2004, p. 25)" Further, Ritzer repeats Weber's overall concern that this world of overlapping systems is nothing short of dehumanizing, for it completely stifles human individuality and its creativity. Indeed, as Weber once described it, it is a world in which people become "cog[s] in the machine" as they move in and around their caged environs, for the most part mindlessly and without wonder (Weber, 1969, p. 455). So the question now arises, has this actually all come to pass? George Ritzer explores this further in his book, The McDonaldization of Society.
Modernization and the McDonaldization of Society In George Ritzer's The McDonaldization of Society, he notes that although McDonaldization is fully embodied in the fast-food industry as illustrated by the history of McDonald's Inc., McDonaldization is also a process that goes beyond the fast-food industry to encompass numerous other sectors of experience. Hence, for Ritzer, McDonaldization is a "wide ranging process…by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society, as well as the rest of the world. (Ritzer, p.1)" McDonaldization is an example of the rationalization of society and its structures—or to put the matter in more classical terms, the iron cage of bureaucracy that sociologist Max Weber once cautioned against.
McDonaldization reflects our increasing movement in and out of rationalized systems and the growing loss of human creativity that results from this fact. McDonaldization describes a system that emphasizes four elements: efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. These four elements of McDonaldization are discussed at length by Ritzer and are summarized briefly below. Elements of McDonaldization: Efficiency Ritzer begins his discussion of efficiency by pointing out that our striving for efficiency has driven our lives to move at a faster pace. In a McDonaldized world, the most efficient means to an end is usually a means that has been tested and determined by experts and taught to us all to follow.
For example, who among us has not placed an order at a fast-food counter, stood aside while the worker pulled our desired food from a shelf, given us a paper cup to fill with soda at the machines to which we (but not the workers) walk, and then given us a tray from which we eat and later use to collect our trash so we (and not the workers) can slide it into the appropriately marked push bins and then stack the tray on top of that same bin? This is a recognizable pattern of behaviors taught to us by the fast-food industry to move us along quickly and efficiently so the next patrons can take our places. Of course, when we really stop to think about it, we can probably recall many other patterns taught to us from other areas of our lives (including school, the workplace, our doctor's office, the self-checkout line at the grocery store) that are all meant to move us through our lives quickly and efficiently.
Elements of McDonaldization: Calculability Calculability is the second principle of McDonaldization—for both workers and their fast food customers. As a principle of factory-line production, calculability required managers to figure projected costs, outputs, and profits along side the extent to which wasteful behaviors could be contained and/or eliminated. Thus calculability was itself premised on efficiency, and this applied as much to the development of the fast-food industry, says Ritzer, as it did to such other precursor industries as steel and automotive production. Moreover, as Ritzer also notes, in a world in which computers would eventually evolve almost as quickly as did fast-food chains (albeit well after the development of fast-food chains) calculability could be extended almost infinitely—and perhaps even magnificently—to the ongoing needs of cost and projected outputs, and worker and profit margins.
Interestingly, calculability is not only about money, says Ritzer (cf., e.g., Ritzer, pp. 10-11). Rather, it is also about product perception and the idea that if some of a product is good, then "more is better," and especially so if gained at a nominal price. Thus, the "lures" of "double," "triple," and "super-sized" product amounts emerged, and with them, the calculated benefit of customer satisfaction: a sense of gain for the customer, and—of equal if not greater import—a definable profit amount for the product producer. Elements of McDonaldization: Predictability The third of McDonaldization's early elements, i.e., predictability, was also born of the marriage between rational efficiency and scientific management.
Primarily, predictability refers to workers repeating the same tasks over and over again (Ritzer, p. 83) so that outputs can be further specified, counted, and calculated, with wasted efforts again kept to a minimum. At the same time, though, says Ritzer, predictability also refers to a certain level of customer standardization, because given that a product has been standardized over time (by employees working to certain standards), customers come to expect a certain level of consistency about that product, i.e., its characteristic look, taste, or feel as a known and now expected commodity. Thus, like efficiency and calculability, predictability also applies to customers, in that customers (as well as workers) become a part of the McDonaldization process (cf., Ritzer, p. 83 and chapter 4, passim). Elements of McDonaldization: Control through Non-Human Technology The fourth element of McDonaldization is control through non-human technology, which again is tied to efficiency as applied to factory-based production, and particularly in the development of the moving assembly line as conceived by Ford's automotive engineers. Thus, as Ritzer notes (in chapter 6 of his text), this moving assembly line not only enhanced worker efficiency, it also controlled this efficiency, and it would do so increasingly, as it was, itself, perfected. To return, then, to our earlier illustration: Who among has not walked to fill our cup, entrusted our nutritional needs to the (robotically) clocked production of fries, meat, and measured milkshakes, bussed our own table, and in general, become the moving counterpart to an obvious "behind-the-counter" worker who, once we order, now moves us along for the final product, and thereby, final profit.
Summary To sum the discussion up to this point: It is Ritzer's thesis that these four elements—efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control through non-human technology—all laid the groundwork for the dynamics of a social phenomenon—McDonaldization—as it would emerge from under the golden arches of McDonald's in the mid-1950s. As the second half of the twentieth century wore on, the four elements of McDonaldization were increasingly applied to other areas of everyday life, from how we receive our medical care to how we receive our education. (See figure 2.1 for a description of how the McDonaldization process has been generalized to other venues in our society.) The more McDonaldized our world becomes, the less we are able to act independently and creatively within in it.
It is, in a sense, a vicious cycle where we are moved along quickly from activity to activity, rushed, pushed, and in greater need of other short-cuts (McDonaldized solutions) to feed, clothe, and entertain us. The impact of this highly rationalized system on our lives is described in a very personal and human way by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. We will conclude our study of the individual in modern society by reading her book, which outlines her first-hand experiences in a series of low-wage jobs in several American cities. Ms. Ehrenreich puts a very human face on the impact of a modern, overly rational society greatly aids our discussion in module 2. References Ehrenreich, B. (2001). Nickel and dimed: On (not) getting by in America. New York: Holt.
Marx, K. (1963). Alienated Labor. In T. B. Bottomore (Ed.), Karl Marx: Early writings (T. B. Bottomore, Trans.). New York: McGraw-Hill. Ritzer, G. (2004). The McDonaldization of society. (Revised new century ed.).
Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Weber, M. (1969). Some consequences of bureaucratization. In L. Cozer & B.
Rosenberg (Eds.), Sociological theories: A book of readings (p. 455). (3rd ed.). New York: Macmillan. Weber, M. (1921/1968). Max Weber on law in economy and society (E.
Shils & M. Rheinstein, Trans., p 223). New York: Simon and Schuster. An interactive timeline on the Middle East protests of 2011. This article discusses the political unrest North Africa, Syria, and Middle East and how has democracy fared against the support for Islam in these regions.