George Ritzer


George Ritzer is an American sociologist, professor, and author who has mainly studied globalization, metatheory, patterns of consumption, and modern/postmodern social theory. His concept of McDonaldization draws upon Max Weber's idea of rationalization through the lens of the fast food industry. He coined the term in a 1983 article for The Journal of American Culture, developing the concept in The McDonaldization of Society, which is among the best selling monographs in the history of American sociology.
Ritzer has written many general sociology books, including Introduction to Sociology and Essentials to Sociology, and modern/postmodern social theory textbooks. Many of his works have been translated into over 20 languages, with over a dozen translations of The McDonaldization of Society alone.
Ritzer is currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Biography

Personal life

Ritzer was born in 1940 to a Jewish family in upper Manhattan, New York City. Ritzer's father was a taxicab driver and his mother was a secretary; he also has one brother. Ritzer described his upbringing as "upper lower class". When his father contracted what Ritzer referred to as "a strange illness," speculated to be from his job as a taxi driver, Ritzer's mother had to do so much as to break open the family's piggy bank, where they stored half dollars, to provide for the family. Living a marginal economic existence, he never felt deprived relative to others while growing up in a "working-class, multi-ethnic neighborhood".
His father never received his high school diploma and therefore, had no strong desire for Ritzer to achieve educationally. Ritzer described his father as being “a very bright man who simply grew up in a different time”. His parents in general did not push him to pursue higher education or knew much about it. Instead, it was more “’ go to college because that’s what people are doing,’ instead of that classic middle class Jewish family push to go to the elite universities’”.
In an interview, Ritzer noted a formative experience that occurred while he attended the Bronx High School of Science, he felt that he was “a pretty average kind of student” as he was among incredibly intelligent individuals. Due to his surroundings, it took him a while to realize that he “was a little bit above average.” In addition, despite the high school being largely orientated toward the sciences and his classmates sharing these interests, Ritzer had no interest in math or science.
While in high school, Ritzer had a friend who he would read the same classic novel such as Crime and Punishment with, and then walk around the city walking miles discussing the book alone. He gave this example in an interview where he was explaining the nature of his high school and the students who went there. Ritzer also noted that “it was just sort of known that if you were bright or saw yourself as bright then you wanted to go to the Bronx High School of Science” to further exemplify the environment he was in during high school.
Growing up, Ritzer was an avid sports player. He often played basketball, in large part due to his height, and other sports like baseball. He also read a lot even as he notes that he wasn’t “very academically inclined".
Ritzer and his wife, Sue, have two children and five grandchildren. Despite being a workaholic, he has always made time for his family. Ritzer also loves to travel, oftentimes using the work trips as a time for a mini vacation with his wife.
Ritzer resides in Maryland with Sue, where he owns three homes. He noted in an interview regarding consumption how the success of his books has “allowed him to acquire things, mostly houses” and gives him the ability to live life the way he wants to. Since he likes to be outdoors, he wants homes that will allow him to do so. For example, due to the restriction of winter months in Maryland which inhibits his ability to walk outside, he purchased a place in Florida where he can continue his hobby of walking “three or four miles a day” when he’s not writing inside.

Education and early employment

Ritzer graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1958, stating to have "encountered the brightest people I have ever met in my life". While at Bronx High School of Science, Ritzer received a New York State Regents Scholarship which would follow him to whichever college he chose to attend.
Ritzer began his higher education at City College of New York, a free college at the time. His scholarship in addition to the free college anyway proved to be a benefit to the economic positioning of the Ritzer family. While at CCNY, Ritzer initially planned to focus on business, but he later changed his major to accounting. Ritzer stated in an interview that he was a student at CCNY when he first stepped inside a McDonalds, which greatly juxtaposed the distinct culture of restaurants and stores in New York. This event unknowingly catalyzed Ritzer's study and major theory of McDonaldization.
After graduating from CCNY in 1962, Ritzer decided that he was interested in pursuing business again. He was accepted into the M.B.A. program at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, where he received a partial scholarship. While at Michigan, his official academic interest was human relations; however, he had many other intellectual hobbies, such as reading Russian novels. Ritzer reported that at Michigan, he was able to grow and improve as a student. However, during his time at Michigan, he remembers being heavily involved in global events occurring at the time. He reports memories of going to the Michigan Union to watch the happenings of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
After graduating from The University of Michigan in 1964, Ritzer began working in personnel management for the Ford Motor Company, however, this proved to be a negative experience for him. His managers mistakenly hired three people, more than was necessary, for the one job, leaving him idle and unoccupied. As he once said: "f we had two hours of work a day, it was a lot." Nevertheless, he was always expected to appear busy. He would constantly wander around the factory for hours observing people working, causing many of the workers and foremen to become hostile towards him. Moreover, Ritzer also found problems within the management structure at Ford. Most of the younger people with advanced degrees defied their less-educated authorities. Ritzer said, "I'd like to see a society in which people are free to be creative, rather than having their creativity constrained or eliminated." This feeling of dehumanization is very relevant in his future sociological work of McDonaldization. Furthermore, he found himself constrained and unable to do anything creative while working at Ford, encouraging him to apply to Ph.D. programs.
Ritzer enrolled in Cornell University's School of Labor and Industrial Relations Ph.D. program in Organizational Behavior in 1965, ironically returning to another business program despite his distaste for his time at Ford. There, his adviser Harrison Trice suggested that he minor in sociology. After a conversation with the head of the department, Gordon Streib, Ritzer realized that he knew nothing about sociology and was then urged to read "Broom and Selznick’s Introduction to Sociology" and found himself enthralled with the subject matter. He continued to succeed in sociology courses at the graduate level. As a testament to his interest and dedication to the subject, he received an A+ on a 102-page paper he wrote for a course on American society. His professor stated that the paper was "too long not to be good". This experience as well as out-reading the other sociology students in a small seminar with Margaret Cussler allowed Ritzer to become more confident as a sociology student due to his ability to outwork the competition. He attributed his talent of being able to compete with well-read and experienced sociology students to his work ethic.
Ritzer never earned a degree in sociology but studied psychology and business. He began his sociological work writing theory connecting his minimal sociological education alongside the experiences that struck him when first experiencing the McDonalds chain stores. As he said in a later interview, "I basically trained myself as a social theorist, and so I had to learn it all as I went." Despite this challenge, Ritzer found that not being trained in social theory was advantageous for him, because his reasoning was not limited to a particular theoretical perspective.

Academic awards

George Ritzer wrote The McDonaldization of Society.
Ritzer's idea of McDonaldization is an extension of Max Weber's classical theory of the rationalization of modern society and culture. Weber famously used the terminology "iron cage" to describe the stultifying, Kafkaesque effects of bureaucratized life, and Ritzer applied this idea to an influential social system in the twenty-first century: McDonald's. Ritzer argues that McDonald's restaurants have become the better example of current forms of instrumental rationality and its ultimately irrational and harmful consequences on people.
Ritzer shared similar views with Weber about rationalization. While Weber claims that “the most sublime values have retreated from public life”, Ritzer claims that even our food is subject to rationalization, whether it is “the McDonaldized experience or the steak dinner that is subjected to the fact that it contains 2,000 calories and 100 grams of fat."”Ritzer identifies four rationalizing dimensions of McDonald's that contribute to the process of McDonaldization, claiming that McDonald's aims to increase:
  1. Efficiency: McDonald's delivers products quickly and easily without inputting an excessive amount of money. The "McDonald's model," and therefore the McDonald's operations, follow a predesigned process that leads to a specified end, using productive means. The efficiency of the McDonald's model has infiltrated other modern-day services such as completing tax forms online, easy weight loss programs, The Walt Disney Company FASTPASSes, and online dating services, eHarmony and match.com.
  2. Calculability: America has grown to connect the quantity of a product with the quality of a product and that "bigger is better". The "McDonald's model" is influential in this conception due to providing a lot of food for not that much money. While the end products feed into the connection between the quantity and quality of the product, so does the McDonald's production process. Throughout the food production, everything is standardized and highly calculated: the size of the beef patty, the number of french fries per order, and the time spent in a franchise. The high calculability of the McDonald's franchise also extends over into academics. It is thought that the academic experience, in high school and higher education, can be quantified into one number, the GPA. Also, calculability leads to the idea that the longer the resume or list of degrees, the better the candidate, during an application process. In addition to academics being affected by the McDonaldization in society, sports, most specifically basketball, have also been affected. It used to be that basketball was a more laid-back, slow-paced sort of game, yet through the creation of fast-food and McDonald's, a shot clock was added to increase not only the speed of the game but also the number of points scored.
  3. Predictability: Related to calculability, customers know what to expect from a given producer of goods or services. For example, customers know that every Big Mac from McDonald's is going to be the same as the next one; there is an anticipated predictability to the menu as well as the overall experience. To maintain the predictability for each franchise, there has to be "discipline, order, systematization, formalization, routine, consistency, and a methodical operation". The predictability of the McDonald's franchise also appears through the golden arches in front of every franchise as well as the scripts that the employees use on the customers. The Walt Disney Company also has regulations in place, like dress codes for men and women, in order to add to the predictability of each amusement park or Disney operation. Predictability has also extended into movie sequels and TV shows. With each movie sequel, like Spy Kids 4, or TV show, Law & Order and its spinoffs, the plot is predictable and usually follow a preconceived model.
  4. Control: McDonald's restaurants pioneered the idea of highly specialized tasks for all employees to ensure that all human workers are operating at exactly the same level. This is a way to keep a complicated system running smoothly; rules and regulations that make efficiency, calculability, and predictability possible. Oftentimes, the use of non-human technology, such as computers, is used. The McDonald's food is already "pre-prepared", the potatoes are already cut and processed, just needing to be fried and heated, and the food preparation process is monitored and tracked. The computers tell the managers how many hamburgers are needed at the lunchtime rush and other peak times and the size and shape of the pickles as well as how many go on a hamburger is managed and controlled. The control aspect of McDonaldization has extended to other businesses, Sylvan Learning and phone operating systems, and even birth and death. Every step of the learning process at Sylvan, the U-shaped tables and instruction manuals, is controlled as well as each step of the birthing process, in modern-day hospitals, and the process of dying.
McDonaldization is profitable, desirable, and at the cutting edge of technological advances. Many "McDonald's" aspects of society are beneficial to the advancement and enhancement of human life. Some claim that rationalization leads to "more egalitarian" societies. For example, supermarkets and large grocery stores offer variety and availability unlike smaller farmer's markets from generations past. The McDonaldization of society also allows operations to be more productive, improve the quality of some products, and produce services and products at lower cost. The Internet has provided countless new services to people that were previously impossible, such as checking bank statements without having to go to a bank or being able to purchase things online without leaving the house. These things are all positive effects of the rationalization and McDonaldization of society.
However, McDonaldization also alienates people and creates a disenchantment of the world. The increased standardization of society dehumanizes people and institutions. The "assembly line" feel of fast-food restaurants is transcending many other facets of life and removing humanity from previously human experiences. Through implementing machines and computers in society, humans can start to "behave like machines" and therefore "become replaced by machines".
The McDonaldization of Society has been translated into over a dozen languages and is arguably one of the best selling monographs in the history of American sociology.