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Some Notes to Accompany Chapter 2 of Ritzer (McDonaldization)

 

I.          Purpose of Chapter:

 

A.        Ritzer wants to address the precursors to McDonaldiza­tion, acknowledging that the phenomenon did not "occur in a vacuum."

 

1.         Theories of Max Weber

2.         F. W. Taylor's Scientific Management

3.         Henry Ford's Assembly Line Levittown

4.         The Shopping Mall

5.         The "original" McDonalds

 

B.        What are some other examples of early bureaucracies?  Is Ritzer leaving out anything important here?

 

1.         Not really, there are many examples of early bu­reaucracies-- Weber wrote extensively on bureau­cracy in ancient society.  The governments of Rome and China; the early Catholic church are prime examples.  However, these cases do not repre­sent fully bureaucratized societ­ies.  Weber, at the end of the last century, believed that the world was at the dawn of becoming entirely bureaucratized.

 

II.        Weber:

 

A.        Some points on Weber's life (Bendix, 1962)

           

1.         Born in 1864, his father was a wealthy lawyer; his mother a woman of culture with deep religious and humanitarian interests--(interests not held by his father).

 

2.         At the age of 4, he suffered an attack of meningi­tis. This debilitating illness, plus his keen intellect and a stimulat­ing family environment, made him withdraw from his peers and started him on a road to scholarship. (Except for college, he lived with his parents until the age of 29-- when he married).

 

3.         He began his studies as a law student at the Uni­versity of Heidelberg in 1882, spent a year train­ing in the army in 1883 and participated in mili­tary exercises as a reservist in 1885, 1887, and 1888. He took his examination in law in 1886

 

4.         He completed a doctoral dissertation in Law in 1889--(A Contribution to the History of Medieval Business Organizations). In preparing to teach Roman, German, and Commercial law at the Universi­ty of Berlin, he completed his second work, Roman Agrarian History and its significance for Public and Private Law, in 1891.  A year later he pub­lished a 900-page work on rural labor in Germany. Just two years later (1894) he became full profes­sor of economics at Freiburg University.  In 1896, he accepted a position at the University of Hei­delberg.

 

5.         At the age of 33, in 1897 he suffered a nervous breakdown and stopped his academic work.  It took him four years to recover.  The only thing that seemed to help was extensive travel.  His scholar­ly work resumed in 1891. There were offers of a renewed professorship at Heidelberg, but he turned them down. 

 

6.         In 1904 he visited the United States to partici­pate in the "Congress of Arts and Sciences."  Heidelberg renewed its offer, but he didn't feel that he could resume the rigors of academic life. However, he came into a wealthy inheritance which allowed him to live independently as a scholar.  And he did up to WWI when he took a break from his own work to become the director army hospitals in Heidelberg.

 

7.         He died of pneumonia in 1920 at the age of 56. 

 

B.        Major works (too numerous for a complete listing here; some major titles):

 

1.         Economy and Society

2.         The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

3.         The Theory of Social and Economic Organization

4.         The Religion of China

5.         The Religion of India

6.         Ancient Judaism

7.         General Economic History

8.         The City

9.         Rational and Social Foundations of Music

 

C.        There are also many volumes that have been compiled from his hundreds of essays.

 

III.       The Iron Cage

 

A.        What is the "iron cage" of bureaucracy that Weber speaks of?  Its the increased control over human life that rationality brings to society.

 

1.         "Weber ... identifies bureaucracy with rationali­ty, and the process of rationalization with mecha­nism, depersonalization, and oppressive routine.  Rationality, in this context, is seen as adverse to personal freedom... He deplores the type of man that the mechanization and the routine of bureau­cracy selects and forms. The narrowed profession­al, publicly certified and examined, and ready for tenure and career.  This type of man Weber de­plored as a petty routine creature, lacking in heroism, human spontaneity, and inventiveness..." (Mills and Gerth, 50).

 

2.         Weber described four attributes of modern bureau­cracy:

 

a.         It is more efficient than alternative systems of administration and efficiency increases to the point where bureaucrat­ic systems of ad­ministration "deperson­alize" the execution of official tasks. (Bendix, 426).

 

b.         Bureaucracy concentrates the means of admin­istration.  "As the size of an organization increases, the resources needed to run it are taken out of the hands of autonomous individ­uals and groups and placed under the control of a ruling minority." (Bendix, 428).  This happens in all aspects of life-- even at the university where private scholars are "expro­priated" from their work as universities built up their own laboratories and libraries upon which schol­ars have come to depend upon-- Modern health care is another example.  The private physician has come to be controlled by hospital-based medicine, HMOs and the like.

 

c.         Modern bureaucracy levels social and economic differences-- it does this by replacing a nepotistic, plutocratic system with a paid, professional, administration that is based on merit.  "Authority is exercised in accordance with rules, and everyone subject to that authority is legally equal." (Bendix, 429)

 

d.         "...[A] fully developed bureaucracy imple­ments a system of authority that is practi­cally indestructible." (Bendix, 430).  The modern world depends on a smoothly function­ing bureaucracy with its experts, specialized divisions, etc., to survive on a day-to-day basis. Once it is in place, it is difficult to remove.

 

3.         The Iron Cage: "Weber anticipated a society in which people would be locked into a series of rational structures, and their only mobility would be to move from one rational system to another... There would, in effect, be no escape from ratio­nality; society would become nothing more than a seamless web of rationalized structures." (p. 23).

 

IV.       Ritzer's metaphor: McDonaldization

 

A.        To Ritzer, "McDonaldization" represents an "Ideal Type" of bureaucratization and rationalization. "The fast food restaurant has become the model of rationali­ty." (p. 19).

 

1.         Formal rationality: "distinctive to the modern west"; "...the search by people for the optimum means to a given end is shaped by rules, regula­tions, and larger social structures. Thus, indi­viduals are not left to their own devices in   searching for the best means of attaining a given objective...In effect, people no longer had to discover for themselves the optimum means to an end; rather, optimum means had already been dis­covered and were institutionalized in rules, regu­lations, and structures." (p. 19).

 

B.        Weber praised bureaucracy and formal rationality for its advantages of speed and efficiency-- he criticized it as being dehumanizing, and the irrationalities that they created.

 

1.         Irrationality of rationality:

 

a.         “The fast food restaurant is a dehumanizing place in which to work and by which to be serviced...these rational­ized settings are places in which `the self was placed in con­finement, its emotions controlled, and its spirit subdued.”

 

b.         Bureaucracies also degenerate into ineffi­ciency and "red tape."

 

c.         Bureaucracies can become unpredictable be­cause situations emerge where employees don't know how to respond or what to do.

 

d.         Frustrated and angry people try to subvert the process.

 

V.        Four elements of formal rationality: (These are important because they are used to organize the book into chapters.

 

A.        Efficiency: Bureaucracy is the best way to coordinate the distribution of vast numbers of resources over great distances to large numbers of people.  Ritzer's example of the IRS is one good example; the military is another.

 

B.        Predictability: Bureaucracies remove uncertainty by "well-entrenched rules and regulations" that try to cover as many contingencies as possible.

 

C.        Calculability: Bureaucracies organize tasks into easily calculated bits and pieces that can be measured and quantified.  Therefore it is easy to measure work output.

 

D.        Control: Bureaucracies exert a lot of control over people (and the social environment).  To do this, they employ non-human technology; rules and regulations defining behavior in each office; restricting the type of goods and services (options) available; 

 

VI.       The seamless web of rationalization:

 

A.        Ritzer points to recreation as an example:

 

1.         Vacationing: the "package tour"

2.         Rationalized campgrounds

 

VII.                 Brief history of rationalization:

 

A.        Scientific Management: (F.W, Taylor)

 

1.         Time-and-motion studies-- Pig iron example.

2.         Separated management from workers-- (workers re­garded as too dumb to understand the principles of scientific management)

3.         Humans treated like cogs in the machine-- dehuman­izing.

 

B.        The assembly line (another form of scientific manage­ment):

 

1.         Highly efficient, predictable, measurable, con­trolled

 

 

C.        Levittowns (made possible by the mass-produced automo­bile and rationally designed super highway system):

 

1.         Rationalization of home building; (a stationary assembly line where workers moved around the prod­ucts); Levittowns, themselves became rationalized places to live because of the nature of the physi­cal environment.

 

D.        Shopping Centers: "The Malling of America"

 

1.         (There are 37,000 malls in the U.S. today-- an average of 740 per state)

2.         What is interesting are the chains of stores that populate these malls and the symbiotic relation­ship between the two.

3.         Again, the automobile and highway system are major factors in the "malling of America."

 

E.         The McDonald Brothers (1937, Pasadena, CA) -- applying the assembly line to the restaurant to create the first "fast food factory." (p. 30).

 

1.         By the time Ray Kroc got involved, the basics were already there-- the fast food factory technique (McDonald brothers, 1937)  and franchising (Sing­er, auto manufacturers, soft drink makers, Dairy Queen, etc. from 1865 onward).

 

a.         McDonald's first franchise opened on April 15, 1955-- after Big Boy; InstaBurger (Burger King); KFC.

 

b.         Ritzer points out that McDonaldization is "...the culmination of a series of rational­ization processes that had been occurring throughout the twentieth century." (p. 32).  Kroc did make important changes that set the stage for wide-scale fast food restaurants.

 

(1)        National (and now, international con­trol) McDonald's was a national fran­chise-- regional franchises not permit­ted.

 

(2)        Low franchising fees-- (McDonald's source of revenue was a 1.9 percent share of store sales).

 

(3)        Franchises were encouraged to come up with innovations-- enabling some cre­ativity to occur.

 

(4)        Kroc's insistence on uniformity and standardization (including an "opera­tions manual" for management and produc­tion within the franchise. 

 

 

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