Analysis Of George Ritzer 's ' Mcdonaldlization '

The way that Burger King and other fast food restaurant chains do business and markets their products to consumers is due to the change in our society to where the consumer wants the biggest, fastest, and best product they can get for their money. This change in society can be attributed to a process known as McDonaldization. Although McDonaldization can be applied to many other parts of our society, this paper will focus on its impact on Burger King and Taco Bell restaurants. My belief is that the process of McDonaldization has lead our generations toward a more a much more efficient lifestyle, with much less quality. From my observations and studies of these fast food resturants, several themes have become

McDonaldization of society- the process by which ordinary aspects of life are rationalized and efficiency comes to rule them, including such things as food preparation p. 173

Mcdonalds is a company that is all about getting your product ordered, made, and delivered as fast as possible, while using the least resources as possible. The McDonald brothers created a system called the Speedee Service System, which helped make the food as fast as possible. Before the Speedee System, restaurants employed short-order cooks, who specialized in making food that had a short preparation time, to get the food made quickly. The chefs required lots of skill and training however, and were often in high demand. The Speedee system however, used many unskilled workers, each who did a small step in the production repetitively, very similar to how Ford’s assembly line worked. Having each resource, whether it be worker or machine, specially dedicated to doing a certain job makes the whole production line much more productive. One example of this is a worker whose job is to receive calls from a mcdonalds drive through. The worker receives calls from Mcdonalds all across the country, in a special call center. As soon as she finishes taking the order and sending it back to the workers in the McDonalds where the order originally came from, she immediately receives another order from a McDonalds somewhere else in the country. Having a dedicated call center not only cuts labour costs, but also creates a more dedicated customer service. Another example of how McDonalds has

Scientific management or "Taylorism" is an approach to job design, developed by Frederick Taylor (1856-1915) during the Second World War. With the industrial revolution came a fast growing pool of people, seeking jobs, that required a new approach of management. Scientific management was the first management theory, applied internationally. It believes in the rational use of resources for utmost output, hence motivating workers to earn more money. Taylor believed that the incompetence of managers was the major obstacle on the way of productivity increase of human labour. Consequently, this idea led to the need of change of management principles. On the base of research, involving analysing controlled experiments under various working

Max Weber used the bureaucracy to represent how the society changes over time whereas Ritzer sees fast food restaurants as a better way to describe how societies change and become more of a contemporary thought pattern. Ritzer understands McDonaldization as a process in which it is slowly taking over the world, he says it can be summarised by just one small quote “the principle of fast food restaurants are coming to dominate more and more sectors of the American society as well as the rest of the world” (Ritzer 2008). He states that the past, present and future of McDonalization has appeared from the iron cage to fast food restaurants which shows that rationalisation is still developing, the iron cage is a way to describe it in the past and McDonaldization helps to describe it in today’s society, rationalisation will continue to progress until other contemporary sociologist find different ways to define it. Although McDonaldization offers many advantages as it gives customers quick food at low prices it also has disadvantages just like the bureaucracy they both suffer from irrationality, like fast food restaurants a bureaucracy can be a ‘dehumanising’ place to work and be served by. Many things are developed by technical devises rather than the human hand (Wynyard 1998)

McDonald’s is a drive thru restaurant where customers need to wait in line to order as well as pick up their food. This is likely the most dehumanising aspect of the company since they treated people as parts of an assembly line. Moreover, routinization such as maximising managerial control can be found in McDonald’s and it is related to the idea of Taylorism. Where Max Weber used bureaucratic model to describe the movement of the shifting society, George Ritzer believed the operation of fast food restaurants have become a more suitable contemporary paradigm in modern community. Therefore, Ritzer introduced his idea of McDonaldization in 1993 and it comprises four key dimensions: efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. Among these components, ‘control’ represents workers become standardized and nonhuman technologies would substitute for them. He declared that the principles of fast food restaurant would dominate more and more regions of American society and throughout the world. In fact, apart from food industry, McDonaldization expands all over the world which include bookstores (B.Dalton’s) and toy stores (Toys R Us) (Ritzer, 1993:1).

George Ritzer, in his book The McDonaldization of Society, has given a good understanding of the kind of world we live in. He describes the concept of McDonaldization, which is the process in which the principles that form the basis of McDonalds are greatly influencing the rest of society. McDonalds runs its business on the following key elements: efficiency, calculability, predictability and control by non-human technologies. A fifth element, which Ritzer perceives as a disadvantage of McDonaldization, is the irrationality of rationality. This is the idea that a society which is based entirely on rationality is not a normal human society because humans are not

In the movie "Falling Down" there are multiple examples of the Ritzer McDonaldization Theory. As soon as the customer walks in he is greeted by a cashier who will take his order, this is an example of efficiency. Soon after the customer started ordering food the cashier explained to him that breakfast was over at 11:30 and he must order from the lunch menu. That was an example of predictability, many chain restaurants have a set schedule of when they stop serving breakfast. When the cashier informs the customer that he must order from the lunch menu, this makes the customer aggitated and refers to her by her first name (Sheila). This occurs because the cashier is wearing a name tag, an example of control monitoring for companies to make sure

According to George Ritzer, bureaucracy completely dehumanized the social institutions in America. He sees the bureaucracy as having four components: efficiency, predictability, control and quantification. He terms this dehumanization of an institution as "McDonaldization". One of the most prevalent examples in modern society is the health care institution. In the past, health care was more simplistic in nature. House calls were not unheard of, and doctors knew all of their patients and their families on a personal level. The doctor who delivered your parents would deliver you as well as your future children. Follow-ups were quite normal; doctors were concerned with your progress for their own peace of mind. It is only recently that the

McDonaldization is becoming the new wave of job types where workers are being deskilled, dehumanized and exploited. Machines are taking over tasks which the employees used to do such as bank machines (interact). The McDonaldized jobs now instead of making the employee do all the work they have the customer working too, for example when the customer cleans up after eating. These jobs are becoming less interactive and personal because workers are becoming dehumanized and only allowed to follow a script, there is also the fact that fast food Company’s use drive through, where limited interaction occurs and are many restrictions. These types of jobs which the author George Ritzer labeled

George Ritzer 's book The McDonaldization of Society opened and exposed one of what can be considered societies major flaws: McDonaldization. Ritzer suggests that in the late 20th century the socially structured form of the fast-food restaurant has become the organizational force representing and pushing rationalization further into everyday lives and individual identity. Henry Ford was the first McDonaldization pioneer with his vision of an assembly line for improving the production of automobiles. His revolutionary idea dramatically changed how many automobiles could be produced and was very efficient.

Mr. George Ritzer explain that Mcdonaldization can be avoided, he gave us good explanation the only time he goes to McDonalds is to use the bathroom he also mentioned that if you have to take your kids there blind fold them something that might not sit too well with the American people . But his theory and concept states that it’s very hard to avoid Mcdonaldization because it has taken over the American society and has become part of our life’s simply what he calls the “Iron Cage” (http://www.learningace.com)

Therefore, people like to have a system that has already been used and that they know works. However, this method is usually the only option offered in a society following the McDonaldization theory, therefore, efficiency becomes a rationalization. An example of this is a typical salad bar at a restaurant. Instead of expecting a plate of salad from the chef, you are expected to go up to the salad bar and serve yourself. This ends up with customers doing most of the work and in addition, customers usually pay more for this, which is a sense of inefficient efficiency on the customers part. The second dimension to its success is calculability, which allows all things such as products sold, cost, and services to be calculated, counted, and quantified. In McDonaldized systems, quantity has become equivalent to quality (Ritzer, p. 12), and therefore, this illusion leads to an erroneous conclusion that more of a product is better. The last dimension, control, is using a theory where the less humans you have working, the chances of causing errors are significantly reduced. Technology that increases control over workers helps McDonaldized systems assure customers that their products and service will be consistent. (Ritzer, p. 15) Still, the less humans working also means that there is greater control over the productions since it would be mainly non-human technology doing work.

McDonald's is the world’s leading food service retailer with more than 30,000 local restaurants in 121 countries serving 45 million customers each day.

McDonald’s has combined Taylor’s, Weber’s, and Fayol’s theories picking out some of the components that best fit their mission. These components include Taylor’s supervision practices, emphasis on efficient specific tasks, and employee placement practices, which represent the mechanistic organization theory. Weber’s hierarchical authority structure, merit based promotion principles, and impersonal management practices. In addition to, Fayol’s bureaucratic management style that stresses planning, organizing and coordinating. Common principles among these three theories like the shared belief in the division of labor, order, and extensive policies are part of McDonald’s management style. In essence, McDonald’s has gathered the components it believed would allow them to accomplish