McDonaldization

McDonaldization is the process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant and popular consumer culture in general are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world, extending even to the realm of religion. Max Weber argued that the bureaucracy served as the ideal type of the rationalization process; the McDonaldization thesis serves as a modification and extension of Weber's argument by replacing the ideal type of the bureaucracy with that of the fast-food restaurant, both of which facilitate widespread standardization. Importantly, the fast-food restaurant represents the extension of standardization and rationalization from the realm of production to that of consumption. The five key components of McDonaldization are (1) efficiency, (2) calculability, (3) predictability, (4) ...