Would you like efficient and productive fries with that?

Sociologist George Ritzer, in his book “The McDonaldization of Society” emulates the excessive amount of rationalization evident in our society and how that amount continues to increase. In order to display this rationalization, Ritzer uses the fast food industry through the term McDonaldization to clarify his thoughts. Before McDonaldization, and rationalization for that matter, society had little control, efficiency, productivity, predictability and organization. Standardization was definitely lacking. However, ever since rationalization came into the picture, systems have become incredibly competent and dynamic with methods to complete tasks in a much smaller window of time. As far as the fast food industry, for example, employees are given a very specific task to focus on. Their only goal is to complete that task in a quick manner. With this strategy, fast food restaurants do not require much multitasking, therefore, ensuring a much faster turnaround between each order. The technology in our society also plays a key role in allowing systems to become much more efficient and organized. Duties requiring humans in the past can now be completed by a machine. Through McDonaldization, companies soon become obsessed with calculability and quantity of food instead of its quality. Ritzer’s main theme in this article surrounded the idea of bureaucracy, which identifies all the key components of rationalization – rules and regulation.

After reading this article as well as discussing the idea of McDonaldization of my sociology class, I definitely agree that our society is being much more rationalized and systemized. If you think about it, the majority of us go by a set schedule every day. This dehumanization is most definitely depicted in the fast food industry. So many individuals are always on-the-go, creating the perfect opportunity to fall into the trap of constantly grabbing fast food on-the-go. I know, personally, my family hardly every eats home-cooked meals as a family anymore. Everyone runs on such a rationalized schedule, it is hard to make time for a sit-down meal. On the contrary, my sociology course has discussed the idea of de-rationalization. However, I still see McDonaldization as having a bigger impact on our society – it is what we are used to. And we all know how much Americans hate change. In my opinion, I definitely do not see a decrease in rationalization in the future, but I do see its rapid increase certainly slowing down.

• What is your opinion of Ritzer’s idea of McDonaldization? Good for society? Harmful?
• Do you think task completion in our society is slowly turning into robotic?
• How can we individually help decrease this rationalization?
• Do you think McDonaldization is going to slow down?