George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (20th Anniversary Edition)

Abstract

George Ritzer, The of Society: 20th Anniversary Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2013, 237 pp., $46.00 paper (978-1-4522-2669-9). Over the past few decades, George Ritzer's work on has effectively become a franchise operation in its own right. Since his initial formulation of the term in a short article in the Journal of American Culture in 1983, the so-called McDonaldization has spawned a score of related books and academic articles by Ritzer and others, generated an extensive secondary literature, become a pedagogical staple in countless university courses, and established itself as part of the popular lexicon in ways that few sociological concepts ever have. The recent publication of a special 20th anniversary edition of Ritzer's The of Society presents us with an opportunity to reflect appreciatively but critically upon this impressive legacy, and to assess how well Ritzer's long-established theoretical framework has been able to adapt to or withstand the shifting winds of intellectual and historical change. Although this seventh edition of Ritzer's classic text has updated its range of topical references and ventured to address a range of new issues, it is also--somewhat counter-intuitively--notably shorter and more concisely argued than the previous edition. Ritzer's decision to condense and combine previously separate chapters and to significantly pare back his analysis of topics such as globalization threatens to amplify the book's preexisting tendency toward intellectual simplification and overgeneralization, but it arguably enhances the book's already considerable appeal as an undergraduate teaching text. While his fellow professional scholars might understandably wish that Ritzer had afforded himself the space to reformulate and defend the thesis with greater nuance, precision, and responsiveness to his critics, it would be remiss of them not to appreciate his unique ability to make otherwise daunting theoretical material accessible, relevant, and exciting for a lay audience. Indeed, in the context of undergraduate sociology courses in which many students often remain quite suspicious of or outright hostile to the ostensibly musty and irrelevant domain of theory, Ritzer's book provides an excellent initiation into the sweep and excitement of theoretical thinking. Drawing upon a broadly conceived version of the Weberian theory of rationalization, all editions of this book have helped students to draw vital connections between far-flung historical events such as the emergence of modern state bureaucracy and the development of Taylorized factory production, the fast food industry, and the McDonaldizing tendencies at work in education, leisure, travel, sports, religion, family life, shopping, popular entertainment, the news media, social work, and many other spheres of contemporary social life. While acknowledging the quasi-democratic and populist appeal of many McDonaldized institutions and experiences, Ritzer--as ever--retains a strong emphasis upon the irrational, destructive, disenchanting, and dehumanizing consequences of formally rational systems. This provides him with a means of establishing a common thread between an array of pressing social, environmental, psychological and health-related risks and pathologies in contemporary society. Ritzer's basic conceptualization of as an insidious, tentacular, and ultimately irrational social process driven by the pursuit of maximum efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control remains intact in this latest edition of his book; he is, however, is at pains to freshly address a variety of recent social, cultural, economic, technological, and intellectual developments that seem to either validate or challenge the ongoing salience of this process. In the first instance, this entails addressing McDonald's own ongoing efforts to rebrand and reposition itself in an era of economic uncertainty, insurgent competition from other restaurant chains, and growing public disaffection with the fast food sector, understood as both the chief emblem of an unhealthy, unsustainable, and morally suspect industrial food system, and as a powerful symbol of the malaise of consumer capitalism more generally. …