Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
The McDonaldization of Society, 19 Sep 2003
By A Customer
If we are to agree with Ritzer, McDonalds has completely transformed our lives. To some extent he is right, and this is what is really scary. Ritzer argues how many businesses have emulated the McDonalds model of efficiency, calculability, predictability and control. In essence, McDonaldized businesses offer products and services in an as efficient way as they can by offering a limited choice to their consumers. Standardization and homogeneity is to be vital to McDonaldization but has helped businesses globalise their operations.Ritzer also goes one step further and shows us how McDonaldization has infiltrated into society as people desire to attain instantaneous gratification- and even how to some extent how our healthcare and education systems now seem to work on McDonald's ethos!
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
The grobalization of nothing, 2 Nov 2006
McDonalds is G. Ritzer's perfect paradigm for explaining the actual structure of our planet. He has built his portrait on Max Weber's rationalization concept. This concept expresses man's search for the optimum means to a given end by rules, regulations and larger social structures. Its driving force is economics (capitalism).
This concept affects virtually all aspects of our society all over the world: work, education, health care, leisure, transport, sports, politics, justice, religion and the family. It shows a planet centered on rational consumerism.
The ingredients of the system are efficiency, calculability, predictability and nonhuman technologies for controlling people. It was greatly helped by technological breakthroughs like automobiles, TV, the computer, internet and lasers (DVD) and by fundamental changes in Western societies (single parent families, working women, higher mobility, increasing disposable income, time savings, mediatization and advertising).
But Max Weber foresaw also the lurking irrationalities, the dehumanization and homogenization, which expressed themselves in environmental and health problems (air pollution), McJobs (disenchantment, false friendliness), traffic jams, bureaucratization.
McDonaldization produces the perfect way of life for people who, as Nietzsche said, use the wrong conjugation: they don't live, they are lived.
For G. Ritzer, McDonaldization is the `grobalization of nothing': a world dominated by the imperialistic ambitions of nations, corporations and organizations, whose main intent is growth of their power, influence and profits. `Nothing' is a social form that is generally centrally conceived, controlled and comparatively devoid of distinctive substantive content.
The author would like to see a more deMcDonaldizated world (see the many recommendations at the end of the book), but McDonaldization is still on the march, certainly in developing countries.
This book is a crucial, superbly documented, text for all those who want to understand the world we live in.
A must read.
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10 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
The Title Says It All, 13 Aug 2001
Despite its snappy title, there is only so much more which can be said on this pop-sociology theme. The book is chock full of analogies between modern society and, you guessed it, big bad Mickey D's. To be fair, George Ritzer presents his material in a balance and reasonable manner, but one does sense that old Ronald MacDonald is being made a scapegoat for all the ills of America's convenience society. Although the rational corporate model (aka MacDonalisation) is creeping around the world, it really only is in the ultra-consumerist American sphere that the effects are pronounced. For example, it would be interesting to examine WHY the rationalized model has been adopted so wilfully. On the whole, an interesting, readable book, but a not saying anything which you probably hadn't already though of.
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