Product Description
Instructor Praise for This Book
"The text is eminently readable. Many of my students . . . identify with the themes very rapidly. They see the connections with their own world of experience and gain confidence in thinking sociologically." -Michael Nofz, University of Wisconsin
“This book has been a fabulous success with students because it combines elements of critical social theory, readability . . . and popular culture.” -Charles R. Frederick, Jr., Indiana University
Student Praise for This Book
“The text opened my eyes up a bit to the world around me.” “I really enjoyed the writing style of the book. . . . I thought of it as a book I would recommend to friends, not as a textbook.”
As one of the most noteworthy and popular sociology books of all time, The McDonaldization of Society 5 demonstrates the power of the sociological imagination to today’s readers in a way that few other books have. The McDonaldization of Society 5 has been updated with many contemporary examples that speak relevantly to today’s student. This engaging book, sure to spark debate both in and out of the classroom, connects the everyday world of the “twenty-something” consumer with sociological analysis. New to McDonaldization 5 - Presents a new concluding chapter on Starbuckization: A new Chapter 10 titled “The Starbuckization of Society?” examines the Starbucks phenomenon in relation to McDonaldization.
- Links pop culture to McDonaldization with contemporary examples: Updated examples include online dating services, Viagra, MDMA (Ecstasy), text messaging, Chipotle, Pollo Campero, extreme sports, robotic surgery with the Da Vinci system, Snack Wraps, megachurches, and more.
- Features an increased focus on globalization: Global issues are more prevalent throughout this edition, particularly in the discussion of the relationship between McDonaldization and the environment in Chapter 7.
- Looks at precursors and future possibilities of McDonaldization: A revised Chapter 2 combines a discussion of the precursors of McDonaldization and content on dealing with contemporary changes in, and future possibilities of, a McDonaldized world.
Ancillaries
- An Instructor’s Resource CD, featuring PowerPoint presentations, suggested essay questions and activities, video resources, teaching tips, an interview with the author, and more, is available for qualified instructors. Contact Customer Care at 1.800.818.7243 (6am – 5pm PT) to request a copy.
- A student study site at www.pineforge.com/mcdonaldizationstudy5 includes interviews with the author, Learning from SAGE Journal Articles, a McDonaldization myspace page, student activities, and more.
IRCDs are available for qualified instructors only. To request an IRCD for this book please contact Customer Care at 1.800.818.7243 (6 am – 5 pm Pacific Time) or by emailing info@sagepub.com with course name and enrollment and your university mailing address to expedite the process. Intended Audience
The bestselling The McDonaldization of Society is already in use in a variety of courses:
Sociology Business & Management Introduction to Sociology Consumer Behavior Social Problems Organizational Communication Social Change Foundations of Leadership Globalization
Sociology of Work
It is also popular in freshman seminars, as well as with those interested in social criticism. (20070620)
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 Enlightening
I am reading this book for my Sociology class and it has completely changed the way I look at society. A must read
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The grobalization of nothing ( lucreynaert )
McDonalds's 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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 Eye Opening Experience ( peacelover05 )
This book was required reading for an undergraduate sociology course for Human Relations majors (sociology course for sociology/education/psychology). It was an eye opening experience because the readers/continuous learner is encouraged to step inside the corporate framework that directly affects our ideas and acceptance of an ideology of busines, etc based on the McDonald's corporate culture.
Our class found it powerful reading and most were challenged to think about and ask, "what are we really doing to improve our lives, culture and global community?"
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McDonald's: Just another Bureaucracy ( edmatos52 )
In his book, "The McDonaldization of Society", George Ritzer writes of McDonald's as a catalyst that provoked rapid and significant changes throughout the fast-food industry and in multinational businesses, changes that directly and circuitously affected people and society in positive and negative ways. However, Ritzer contends that McDonaldization has contributed more negatively to society than positively. It is rare that such an erudite study can also be so readable by the public.
Many people can easily recall the long lasting societal effects of such creations as the fax, the World Wide Web and email, the effects of global warming, the passing of NAFTA and so on, but few have considered the influence of a fast-food franchise such as McDonald's. When people think of McDonald's, they envision the fast-food giant of the industry - serving up their famous "Big Mac", fries, and milkshake. Few people can imagine of the impact of McDonald's upon society, but in "The McDonaldization of Society", George Ritzer illustrates these changes in a clear concise examination of this phenomenon.
Ritzer writes of the many industries that have strived to emulate McDonald's success by utilizing their system of operation, companies like Pizza Hut, Dominos, Wendy's, Toys R Us, Eye Masters, USA Today and other newspapers (McPapers) and so on. There are a host of other industries that have fashioned themselves after the McDonald's mold, like McDoctors, Books-on-Tapes, McBanks, ATMs, and so forth. These and many other industries are viewed as direct by-products of McDonaldization. However, Ritzer makes it clear that Ray Kroc (McDonald's CEO) neither created the "McDonald's principles nor the idea of a franchise. Ray Kroc's genius was in the way he combined many of the ideas of bureaucracy, the McDonald brothers, and other franchises into the McDonald's franchise of today.
The central theme in Ritzer's book is the "enabling" and "constraining" affects of McDonaldization and how this phenomenon has changed parts of society both in the United States and abroad - from private and public industries to its citizenry. Ritzer contends that McDonald's success is a direct outcome of their implementation of a kind of bureaucratic system that involves the concepts of "efficiency, quantification, predictability, and control" (rules and regulations). This system, according to Ritzer, results in striking changes throughout society, dehumanization of employees and to a great extent even control over consumers. Ritzer considers these four components to be at the heart of McDonaldization and therefore covers the concepts in separate detailed chapters.
Ritzer views McDonald's as a metaphor for bureaucracy with all the benefits and drawbacks of bureaucracies. Bureaucracies function under the same principles of efficiency, quantification, predictability, and control and in Ritzer's view "[w]e must therefore look at McDonaldization as both "enabling" and "constraining." McDonaldized systems enable people to do things they were unable to do in the past (work faster, efficiently, have more free time, etc.). However, these same systems also keep individuals from doing things that they would otherwise do (be creative, have quality time....). George Ritzer writes that "[t]he success of the McDonald's model suggests that many people have come to prefer a world in which there are few surprises". McDonaldization is a "double-edged" sword working for and against people.
Ritzer is more concerned with the social impact of McDonaldization than he is in documenting the history of McDonald's as the goliath of the fast-food industry. Nevertheless, in presenting his case, against McDonaldization, Ritzer succeeds in debunking many of the misconceptions concerning Ray Kroc and McDonald's. He reminds his reader that Mac and Dick McDonald were the originators of McDonald's. It was the McDonald's brothers - not Ray Kroc ? that created the concept of assembly line procedures, cheap prices, short menus, and the idea of fast food.
The reader will learn that bureaucracies function under the concept of "rationality" and how this concept can be found in virtually all forms of bureaucracies. Ritzer also posits that systems based on rationality invariably result in irrationality (all bureaucracies suffer from the "irrationality of rationality") and he links this concept to McDonaldization. Ritzer conveys his concerns with the role played by bureaucratic systems that affect and/or limit interaction among, individual, how they create a robotic state in workers, how bureaucracies stump creativity, freedom of choice and expression and so on.
As support for his contentions on bureaucracies, Ritzer discusses Max Weber's writings on bureaucracies. McDonald's is amplification and an extension of Max Weber's theory of rationalization. Ritzer makes the connection between efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control to Max Weber's theory of bureaucracy in which bureaucracies function by Weber's concept of formal rationality. According to George Ritzer and Max Weber, economics may be at the forefront of all bureaucracies (rational systems) in one form or another; this is Ritzer's opinion concerning McDonaldization.
"The McDonaldization of Society" envelopes concepts in sociology, psychology, politics, and economics, such as, role playing, rituals, behavior modification, reward and punishment, dehumanization, hierarchies, deviancy, rational irrational systems, formal structures, cost v. profits, quantity v. quality and so forth. At the end of the book, George Ritzer outlines some strategies that people can use to fight, resists and/or limit McDonaldization in their lives ? some ideas are logical and others radical. Ritzer's writing on McDonaldization, its concepts and affects on society makes for surprising and enlightening reading.
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 Full of inaccuracies . . . little creative thought. ( danpartsman )
I read this book hoping for a fair and balanced critical review of modern business. I found it to be little more than an attempt to justify a position that "all big business is bad". While that may be true, Ritzer spends a decent portion of the book using invalid arguments to support it.
For example, Ritzer claims that McDonalds hires young people "because their minds are more easily controlled than adults" (no mention that they worked cheaper), and was critical that McDonalds did not foster "creativity" on the job. Personally, I don't want teenagers to be creative with my food . . . and it seems it's not a bad idea that they learn a little discipline at work and as they mature and learn to make better decisions they can find jobs to be creative in.
Another criticism Ritzer uses is that universities "control" professors by setting a time schedule for classes - this is obviously not an attempt to control professors; it is instead the only way students can attend more than one class per semester.
Maybe I got turned off in the first chapters with his comparison of McDonalds to Hitler's gas chambers, could he have found something a little less sinister to compare it to?
That said, the argument that society is irreversibly changed because of industrialization . . . for better or for worse is certainly is a valid point . . . I just want to hear it argued with a little more critical review and common sense.
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