“McDonaldization”

At its origins, the concept of “McDonaldization” involved an effort to bring Max Weber's early-20th-century theory of rationalization into the late 20th century. In doing so, it sought to replace Weber's paradigm for the process—the bureaucracy—with the fast food restaurant. The argument was that in more recent years, the fast food restaurant has become a better paradigm for this process than the bureaucracy. It was labeled McDonaldization because McDonald's was, and is, the leader in the fast food industry and a model not only for it but for many other businesses and other kinds of organizations, even churches and universities. In applying the idea of rationalization to the fast food restaurant, it was extended from such work settings as the large-scale bureaucracy (especially political in nature) and the factory to the realm of consumption. Instead of a focus on the rationalization of production and work, the focus shifted to the rationalization of consumption.

This shift was a revolutionary development that McDonald's played a key role in spearheading. After all, it is one thing to rationalize the activities of those whom an organization employs and pays, but it is quite another thing to impose rationalization on those who are independent and who pay the organization. Employees have little choice but to accept the rationalization of their work lives, but consumers would appear to be free to reject efforts to rationalize the process of consumption and to take their business elsewhere.

Although the major contribution of the McDonaldization thesis lies in a greater understanding of consumption and the settings in which it occurs, the fact is that these locales are also places where people work—in fact, millions of people. [Page 574]Interestingly, these are also the settings in which the development of the prosumer, one who both produces and consumes, was greatly expedited. There have always been prosumers; in fact, all of those whom we think about as either producers and consumers are actually prosumers. Those who produce simultaneously consume (e.g., their labor time and raw materials), and those who consume simultaneously produce (e.g., the very process of consumption or the meaning of a brand). Although other settings devoted to consumption, especially supermarkets, had preceded McDonald's in the exploitation and expansion of prosumption by having consumers do “work” (gather their own groceries) previously done by workers (grocers and their clerks), McDonald's pushed this to a whole new level by having consumers serve as their own waitresses, soda jerks, and buspersons. The drive-through window further expands this process by having consumers cart off their own debris-to-be, thereby putting them in the position of serving as garbagepersons for McDonald's.