McDonaldization: Reviving classical sociological theory

Since its modest launching in the early 1960s, McDonald’s Corporation has become one of the greatest food retailers on earth, operating in 41,822 restaurant outlets in 119 countries worldwide and serving over 70 million customers daily. In the early 1980s, George Ritzer, a sociologist, turned ‘McDonaldization’ into a concept which decrypts the elementary societal forms of late-20th-century modernity: efficiency, calculability, predictability and technological control. McDonaldization has become not only a dominant managerial practice, but also a civilizational icon. Ritzer rallies to his aid classical sociological theorists, first and foremost Max Weber, but also Emile Durkheim and Karl Marx, and altogether he offers a wide-range survey of how global, local and glocal (as well as ‘grobal’) processes shape present-day society.