McDonaldization

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The McDonald’s Society

The society is gradually recognizing principles used by fast food restaurants, famously known as McDonald’s, and is adopting it in all aspects of life both social and economic, in both private and public sector. This is what George Ritzer termed as McDonaldization. George Ritzer expanded Max Weber’s theory of rationalization to create his theory of irrationalization. In his analysis, Max Weber was of the opinion that, with industrialization brought rationality and bureaucracy. This is whereby the human society was changing it traditional way of thinking and operating and was adopting bureaucracy as a better alternative as it provided a variety of choices (Mommsen, 21). George Ritzer, however, argued that the adoption of bureaucracy into social life is changing the human basic thinking and social way of life calling it irrationality of rationality(Ritze, 3).  McDonaldization focuses on for principles of production that are essential in an organization, namely;

Firstly, calculability and this is the principle where the organizations believe quantity is much better than quality. Therefore, you produce in large quantity to a large number of customers at a lower price hence increasing the sales (Mommsen, 34). This ignores the fact that the quality of the product matters rather than producing less quantity of high quality and price which will not be affordable to many and thus reducing the sales of the organization. Secondly, efficiency this is the principle of the shortest way out. It is an application of a mechanism that maxims the output within the shortest time possible. In other words, it is the use of fastest, quickest and cheapest method to produce a product. Thirdly, predictability and it is a principle where organizations are producing homogeneous products in all their outlets or branches. This ensures that a customer a customer can get a similar product whenever they are interacting with the organization (Mommsen, 34). For instance, in the fast foods industry, a client who buys fries from an outlet in the Texas is assured to get a similar product when traveling away from home for instance to Europe.

Lastly, control, McDonaldization encourages of the use of non-human technology to reduce or replace the human workforce. Non-human technology is known for its efficiency, predictability and also mass production for a fraction used by the human workforce. This ensures the products are cheap and affordable. A perfect example is Microsoft software such as the Microsoft Office. These products are homogeneous, and one need to learn about them once in a life time and can be able to apply the anywhere in the world (Ritze, 7).  .

Contrarily, as a Windows user I am always assured that every time I want a Microsoft product no matter where I am in the world, I can purchase it almost if not the same price. I also know what to expect from the product since they are homogeneous. Am also assured when using word document I can be able to produce copies of the same document in large quantities at a relatively lower price than hiring a human workforce to replicate the original. This has really changed the way the society works as it is easier to just have one machine from a computer where I can just copy paste my documents which will cost me less in terms of time and money, the produced documents will be similar and no surprises of human errors(Ritze, 8).  .