Mcjobs george ritzer biography

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I mean, from my point of view, it stands for efficiency and predictability. (Barber, 1995) termed the “McWorld” an opposite of “Jihad”- localised and reactionary forces that glorify intense nationalism and lead to more significant heterogeneity.

The concept of globalisation segues into Ritzer’s next theory of McDonaldisation.

The notion of McDonaldisation

Perhaps his most significant theory, the model of rationalism manifests itself through the model of a world-famous restaurant rather than the bureaucracy.

Control

McDonald’s systems exercise a great deal of control through technology. Actually Michelle Foucault, the French poststructural theorist, talked about these micropolitics of control, micromechanisms of control and I think that what's being set in place here is not an iron cage, but innumerable mini iron cages and there are so many of them and they're so widely spaced throughout society that the iron cages envisioned here is one where you simply have your choice of which cage to enter but there's nothing but cages to go to.

What effects does a McDonaldised society have on the people in the society?

I think that McDonald's has a profound effect on the way people do a lot of things I mean it leads people to want everything fast, to have, you know, a limited attention span so that kind of thing spills over onto, let's say, television viewing or newspaper reading, and so you have a short attention span, you want everything fast, so you don't have patience to read the New York Times and so you read McPaper, you read USA today.

The French were very upset about the coming of Coca Cola to France. So that's the reason why it is dehumanising. I mean the fundamental problem with McDonaldised systems is that it's other people in the system structuring our lives for us, rather than us structuring our lives for ourselves. But that was just the influx of an American product - what we have here is the influx of an American way of life, which is to trivialise eating, to make it something that is fast, make it something that's to get done and over with.

The customer will know how to order, where to pay, where to collect their order, and where to exit across the globe in any restaurant branch.

Calculability

 The focus is on quantity over quality. There is nothing that seems to be immune to this process, no aspect of life that seems to be immune to it.

His writings include The McDonaldization of Society (9th ed., 2019), Enchanting a Disenchanted World (3rd ed. Red Lobster or a chain like that is selling fairly upscale food but you now see signs that some elegant restaurants are trying to move in the direction of developing chains. The idea is to turn humans into human robots.

For other people it stands for America and America's influence throughout the world, so it gets picked up as a positive model. He’s now writing about Bitcoin and blockchain from the sociological standpoints of his interests in consumer culture, consumption, globalisation, and McDonaldization.

Globalisation

Globalisation is the integration of the world’s cultures, economies and populations.

So you take all creativity out of all activities and turn them into a series of routinised kinds of procedures that are imposed by some external force.

mcjobs george ritzer biography

from children who have been trained by McDonald's or gone to McDonald's schools and done everything that they had to do from one McDONALD'S SYSTEM AFTER ANOTHER?


Obviously McDonalds and related corporations are spending billions of dollars to socialise children into this system so that this becomes their standard.



One of the basic premises of McDonald's is to focus on quantity, low price (or what appears to be low price) and large quantities of things and inevitably what suffers when you emphasise quantity is quality so they are serving what is at best mediocre food.

Another sort of pessimistic aspect to this is that you have children born into this McDonaldised world, you have people being trained, being lured into the system by the commercials and the toys and the clowns and the bright lights.

But there are also always counter-reactions, there are also always all sorts of things that are coming up from the people that represent innovations and creations.

This critique aligns with a broader sociological concern about the effects of capitalism and modernity on the individual and society.

Globalization and the Grobalization-Glocalization Framework

Beyond McDonaldization, Ritzer has extensively written about the impact of globalization on societies.


The [McLibel] trial does question that squeaky clean image that the company wants to foster, so they do their best to resist it and fight against it.

In fact, McDonald's could disappear tomorrow, or could go out of business tomorrow and this process would continue on. I think fewer and fewer Americans are sensitised to it, question it.