Essentials of Sociology. George Ritzer

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СКАЧАТЬ restaurant, employees ask what they wish to order, following scripts created by the corporation. For their part, customers can expect to find most of the usual menu items. Employees, following another script, can be counted on to thank customers for their order. Thus, a highly predictable ritual is played out in the fast-food restaurant.

      • Control. In McDonaldized systems, technology exerts a good deal of control over people, processes, and products. French fry machines limit what employees can do and control any remaining tasks. They buzz when the fries are done and even automatically lift them out of the hot oil when they’ve reached just the right amount of crispiness. Workers must load fry baskets with uncooked fries and unload them when the baskets emerge from the oil. The automatic fry machine may save time and prevent accidents, but it limits and dictates employee actions and leaves them with little meaningful work. Similarly, the drive-through window can be seen as a technology that ensures that customers dispose of their own garbage, if only by dumping it in the backseats of their cars or on the roadside.

      Paradoxically, rationality often seems to lead to its exact opposite—irrationality. Just consider the problems of meaningless work, roadside litter due to drive-through services at fast-food restaurants, or the societal problems associated with childhood obesity, which has been blamed, in part, on the ubiquity of fast food. Another of the irrationalities of rationality is dehumanization. Fast-food employees are forced to work in dehumanizing jobs, which can lead to job dissatisfaction, alienation, and high turnover rates. Fast-food customers are forced to eat in dehumanizing settings, such as in the cold and impersonal atmosphere of the fast-food restaurant, in their cars, or on the move as they walk down the street. As more of the world succumbs to McDonaldization, dehumanization becomes increasingly pervasive.

      Critiquing Consumption

      The sociological study of consumption sites involves, among many other things, a critical look at the ways in which they are structured. (The previous discussion of the irrationalities associated with McDonaldized settings is one example of such a critical perspective.) These sites may be set up to lead people to consume certain things and not others, to consume more than they might have intended, and to go into debt (Brubaker, Lawless, and Tabb 2012; Manning 2001; Marron 2009; Ritzer 1995). Consider Shoedazzle (www.shoedazzle.com), a website that uses commercials and “style quizzes” to recruit new members. Shoedazzle highlights an “exclusive” VIP membership status on its webpage, which anyone can join. Making its members feel special through seemingly personalized style quizzes and VIP memberships lures consumers into buying more shoes (and other products) than they really need.

      Sociologists are also interested in how consumers use shopping malls and e-tailers in ways that were not anticipated by their designers. For example, people often wander through shopping malls and their many shops, which have been designed to spur consumption, without buying anything. Defunct malls are serving as impromptu skate parks. Students are using Amazon.com as a source for term-paper bibliographies rather than buying the books. Travelers are using internet sites such as Expedia and KAYAK to compare prices but then buying airplane tickets on the airlines’ own websites.

      Social change continues. The Great Recession and its aftermath altered many things, including the degree to which society is dominated by consumption. Even today, long after the onset of the recession in 2007 and its supposed end, many U.S. consumers remain reluctant to spend money, or at least as much as they did in the past, on consumption (Kurtz 2014). As a result, consumption sites have experienced great difficulties. Many outdoor strip malls and some indoor malls have emptied; they have become “dead malls” (as documented on the site http://deadmalls.com). Many of the malls that continue to exist have numerous vacant stores, including abandoned large department stores. Las Vegas, which has long been a capital for the consumption of entertainment and high-end goods and services, has been hurting (Nagourney 2013). Casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, are being shuttered, and there are those who want to see the city become more like the simpler beach community it once was (Hurdle 2014). Dubai, aspiring to be the consumption capital of the East, hit a financial rough spot in 2009 and has yet to recover completely from it. It seems possible, although highly unlikely, that even though we entered the consumption age only about half a century ago, we now may be on the verge of what could be called the “postconsumption age.” While excessive consumption and the related high level of debt were key factors in causing the Great Recession, a postconsumption age would bring with it problems of its own, such as fewer jobs and a declining standard of living for many.

      Trending The McDonaldization of Society: Into the Digital Age, 9th ed. (Sage 2019)

      George Ritzer

      As its main title suggests, this book focused, at least originally, on McDonald’s, other fast-food restaurants, and other “brick-and-mortar” consumption sites such as IKEA, Walmart, other chain stores, shopping malls, and amusement parks. However, as is clear in the new subtitle, the focus of the last edition has moved in the direction of consumption sites on the internet, as well as to mixed “bricks-and-clicks” consumption sites (Belk 2013). The prime example of both, and the giant in the world of contemporary consumption, is Amazon.com. Amazon.com is a dominant force on the internet, especially in consumption (with 43 percent of all e-commerce [Wingfield 2017]), but it is also increasingly a force in bricks-and-clicks with the opening in recent years of conventional bookstores and convenience stores and with its purchase in 2017 of the Whole Foods chain of supermarkets. These “brick” sites complement in various ways the “clicks” on Amazon.com, and they are increasingly likely to do so in the future as Amazon creates a more seamless system.

      Comparisons between McDonald’s and Amazon.com from the point of view of the McDonaldization thesis demonstrate that Amazon.com is far more McDonaldized than McDonald’s.

       Amazon.com makes obtaining a wide array of products highly efficient by eliminating lengthy and perhaps fruitless trips to department stores, big-box stores (such as Walmart), and the mall. What could be more efficient than sitting at home, ordering products online, and having your order delivered in a day or two? While McDonald’s made obtaining a meal in a restaurant more efficient through the drive-through window, it still has the inefficiency of requiring consumers to drive (or walk) to the restaurant to get their food.

       Shopping on Amazon.com involves a highly predictable series of online steps that lead to the completion of an order. McDonald’s brought great predictability to eating in a restaurant. There are well-defined steps in obtaining a meal there: join the line, scan the marquee to know what to order when you (finally) get to the counter, order, pay, take the tray of food to a table, eat it, and dispose of the debris on completion of the “meal.” However, there are a series of unpredictabilities at McDonald’s, absent at Amazon.com, such as those associated with inattentive, surly, or incompetent counter people.

       There is great calculability involved in shopping on Amazon.com. Prices are clearly marked and consumers know exactly what the total cost of an order is. Before finalizing a purchase customers are able to delete items, thereby reducing the final cost. The marquee at McDonald’s offers preset prices and similar calculability, although unless customers are able to do the math in their heads, the final price is not known until the purchase is completed.

       Shopping on Amazon.com is tightly controlled by the nature of the site and its reliance on nonhuman technologies. Consumers can only order what is on the site and cannot ask (there is no one to ask) for products to be modified. In addition, there are no crowds, to say nothing of unreliable and intrusive salespeople, on Amazon.com. Great control is exerted СКАЧАТЬ