Ritzer, George

George Ritzer (b. 1940) is Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland. His most important work has been in sociological theory, especially metatheory, and the application and development of theory in the sociology of consumption. Outside sociology, George Ritzer is best known for his term, McDonaldization. He has other and perhaps stronger claims to significance in sociology, but this article will begin with McDonaldization, because it is one of the few recent ideas that have originated in sociology and connected with a general intellectual public.

As Ritzer recognized, McDonald's has become a key symbol that connects the process of socialization through mundane activities (our childhood experiences of dining out) to global capitalist developments (the golden arches as one of the most prominent signs of American imperialism). However, Ritzer argues that the process of McDonaldization is of greater importance than the actual McDonald's. As described in The McDonaldization of Society, this process means a focus on efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control, but it is accompanied by the seemingly inevitable irrationality of rationality. McDonald's is the epitome of this, but McDonaldization is a process that is increasingly evident in a wide range of settings (e.g., the McDonaldization of education, the church, the health system, criminal justice, and so on).

The idea of McDonaldization is an elaboration of Max Weber's theory of rationalization. For Weber, the bureaucracy was the embodiment of the increasing formal rationality of the modern world, but Ritzer argues that the bureaucracy's vanguard role has been taken over by the fast-food restaurant. Like the bureaucracy before it, the fast-food restaurant both exemplifies this rationalization in its organizational form and, at the same time, constitutes one of the main vectors for its further dissemination. The bureaucracy allowed formal rationality to dominate our political and economic life. The fast-food restaurant opens up the realm of mundane activities and personal taste.

McDonaldization provides a key point from which to understand Ritzer's evolution as a theorist. Before McDonaldization, Ritzer was mainly concerned with delineating the existence of multiple paradigms in sociology and encouraging their integration. McDonaldization is, in part, an outgrowth of this work, since it integrates Weber's theory of rationalization with Marx's theory of capitalism, as well as neo-Marxist work on control. However, despite its deep roots in classical sociology, there is something new in Ritzer's concept. The rationalization of consumer organizations is different from the rationalization of administrative and production organizations. Therefore, McDonaldization can be seen not only as an outgrowth of Ritzer's early work but also as the beginning of his more recent interest in consumption.

Ritzer's early work in sociological theory concerned metatheory—that is, the systematic study of the underlying structure of sociological theories. Sociology: A Multiple Paradigm Science was an assessment of Thomas Kuhn's idea of paradigms and an application of this concept to sociology. Ritzer argued that sociology is divided into three fundamental paradigms. The social facts paradigm focuses on large social structures and external social constraints such as norms and values. The social definition paradigm focuses on the way in which actors define their social situation. The social behavior paradigm focuses on the social causes and effects of the unthinking behavior of individuals. This examination of paradigms allowed Ritzer to look at fundamental commonalities between seemingly disparate theories, as well as identify theorists who “bridged” these paradigms.

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