McDonaldization


McDonaldization (of society)

the process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world’ (G. Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society, 1993). The forces behind this tendency, as described by Ritzer, are ‘efficiency’, ‘calculability’ and ‘predictability’, manifest in ‘increased control and the replacement of human by nonhuman technology’. There are contradictions in this process, not least a loss of‘quality’, which has to be counteracted by defining the new products favourably in extensive advertising. But the ‘advantages’ of McDonaldization are such that its principles have spread to many areas, including higher education. For a critique see B. Smart, Resisting McDonaldization,Sa ge, 1999.