The Mcdonaldization of Society: Gustavo Alvarez

 Gustavo Alvarez 

IHSS 

Mr. Roddy 

9/27/2021 

The Mcdonaldization of Society 

    Something interesting that I observed from reading was how the work ethics and the overall characteristics of fast food chains such as McDonalds started to affect our society and how we act, work, and look at things. When we look at all of these things together you can clearly see the bureaucratic "Fast Food" influence that our modern society holds. Many of these things include a priority of efficiency, calculability, Predictability and standardization, and control, and while these characteristics aren't necessarily the biggest part of our society, the influence of this new system has grown extremely high in the past 70 years with inventions that make our society more efficient and calculable. Meanwhile at first it may not seem like a bad system, the fact that these sort of policies control your life and how you act are in some way dehumanizing. A good quote from the writer of McDonaldization, George Ritzer, is "Most specifically, irrationality means that rational systems are unreasonable systems. By that, I mean that they deny the basic humanity, the human reason, of the people who work within or are served by them." Basically what he is saying is that this system dehumanizes workers by treating them more as machines and animals than actual humans. 

    In my opinion this system is very harmful and dangerous to every person that is not in a big position of power. It makes a big power gap between the powerful that are the ones making McDonaldization into a societal thing and the workers and other people working for these individuals of power. Regardless of West or Eastern societies, this is a system that has started to plague large communities of people and affect their health, their rights, and their happiness. I also see that this new system of “McDonaldization” has used a mask of having a society of “Individualism”, and freedom to hide what is actually happening which is a society of collectivism governed by the powerful that made it. I do not think there is much hope either on derooting the roots of this ideology since it already seems to be a narrative that most politicians and CEOs try to push. The only true way to really cope with this system is by trying to gain more rights and freedom for oneself but if that were to happen it still wouldn'tbes change the core parts of the society we would live in. While I do not think we are in the part that we have to panic about full blown McDonaldization in 20-30 years I feel like this term could be way more relevant.