S02a - Mcdonaldization

And Its Precursors From the Iron Cage to the Fastfood Factory Xiaolian and Sheena

Bureaucratization and Rationalization: Into the Iron Cage

• Bureaucracy, a formally rationalized structure • Emerging iron cage of rationality • Its advantages for speed, efficiency and mechanisms for discovering and implementing optimum means to ends • Irrationalities of formally rationalized systems eg: dehumanizing, quantify and control

Scientific Management • Designed to make work more efficient which is the time and motion studies • Nonhuman technology which exerted great control over workers • Workers required to do one or few things where most skills and abilities were not used • Brought together with the principles of bureaucracy and assembly line to the creation of McDonaldization

The Assembly Line: Producing Robot-like Workers • Ideas of scientific management shape it to suit automobile industry • An efficient system for manufacturing automobile that is predictable, quantification and maximum control • Replace by robots for the simplified tasks • The use of conveyor belt • The introduction of chains

Levittown: “Houses Go Up Boom, Boom, Boom” • Highly rationalized, produced in mass • Rationalize work of construction laborer similar to automobile worker • “The same man does the same thing everyday” • Constructions are rigidly defined & of rationalized steps • Consumer getting the most house for the least money

Shopping Centers: “The Malling of America” • Another aspect of rationalized society • 37,000 malls in US, 175 million shoppers per month • Exhibit basic characteristics of McDonaldization • Shopping malls & McDonaldized chains complement one another beautifully

Ray Kroc and the McDonald Brothers: Creating the “Fastfood Factory” • First opened in 1937 by Mac and Dick McDonald • Based on quantifiable principles of speed, volume and low price • Job fragmentation / Specialization • Ray Kroc build the McDonald’s empire of franchising  Uniformity  Maximized central control  Profits  Encourage innovations  Rational principles

Conclusion • McDonald’s & process of McDonalization did not occur in a historical vacuum • Contributed structural bases needed for fast-food chain to thrive • McDonalization is a logical extension of the idea of rationalization and a label to describe the most contemporary aspects of this process.