ABSTRACT
The way a people provide for themselves will always be a central aspect of daily life, hence an important source of metaphors for the nature of society as a whole. Not surprisingly, then, throughout American history, certain businesses or industries have functioned as icons for the prevailing cultural zeitgeist, even if they directly represented only a small slice of reality. The cowboy is a striking example of this; while this profession was only a tiny percentage of the population, the cowboy signified a cultural ethos on an epic scale. Later, Henry Ford’s assembly line would represent rationalized work within a culture where science, rationality, and centrally controlled large-scale organizations typified the emerging dominant zeitgeist.1 Ritzer’s (1983) McDonaldization thesis elaborately illustrates this highly scientific-rational spirit of the modern society. In “The McDonaldization of Society,” Ritzer (1983) argued that McDonald’s, with its uniformity, efficiency, calculability, and control, was an apt metonym2 for the forces of modern capitalist globalization. More critically, Ritzer saw McDonald’s strictly taste-and sizecontrolled hamburgers, scripted employee-customer interactions, generic friendliness, and unwavering emphasis on quantity at low prices over creativity and quality as pertinent symbols for an overly rationalized and homogenized culture. Hence, McDonaldization is not the story just of McDonald’s per se, but a larger historical and social allegory. Historical forces create conditions in which a particular type of organizational structure becomes popular. McDonald’s is a pioneering and iconic example of a specific type of organizational structure, which in turn is linked to the particular social and economic trends that gave rise to it. McDonaldization is Ritzer’s term for the process by which other organizations adopt a similar structure in response to similar economic and social forces.
