Читать книгу Sociology - Anthony Giddens - Страница 153

Anyone who has eaten at a McDonald’s restaurant abroad as well as at home will have noticed many similarities. The interior decorations may vary, the language spoken will differ, but the layout, the procedure for ordering, staff uniforms, and ‘service with a smile’ are essentially similar. Compared with many other restaurants, one of the obvious differences at McDonald’s is just how efficient the whole process is. Staff members work on specialized, straightforward jobs: one makes the fries, another flips the burgers, a third puts the burger in a bun and adds the salad. Much of the process is also automated – milkshakes at the press of a button, deep fryers that work at set temperatures, and tills with buttons for each item so staff do not even have to learn food prices.

But why should sociologists be interested in fast food? George Ritzer (1983, 1993, 1998) argues that McDonald’s provides a vivid metaphor of recent economic and cultural transformations. What we are witnessing, he says, is the ‘McDonaldization’ of society: the process by which the basic principles of fast-food restaurants come to dominate other areas of society. Using the four guiding principles of McDonald’s restaurants – efficiency, calculability, uniformity and control through automation – Ritzer argues that modern societies are becoming ever more ‘rationalized’ and that McDonald’s is simply the best exemplar of the process. ‘McDonaldization’, he notes, is catchier than ‘Burger Kingization’ or ‘Starbuckization’.

Like Weber, Ritzer claims that the long-term process of rationalization can, paradoxically, generate irrational outcomes. Weber saw that bureaucracies take on a life of their own, spreading through social life with harmful as well as positive consequences. Similarly, Ritzer argues that the apparently rational process of McDonaldization spawns a series of irrationalities – damage to our health, from a ‘high calorie, fat, cholesterol, salt, and sugar content’ diet, and to the environment, with all the packaging that is thrown away after each meal. Most of all, McDonaldization is ‘dehumanizing’. People file forward in queues as if on a conveyer belt, while staff repeat the same tasks over and over again, like robots.

Ritzer’s thesis has been very influential in sociology, though in recent years McDonald’s has been forced to change its practices to compete in the global economy, tailoring its ‘product’ to fit the local cultures in particular markets around the world – an excellent example of glocalization in practice.