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RITZER APPLIES WEBER:  The McDonaldization of Society

Rationalization as an ideal type and as an historical force appears in much of Weber’s writings. He regards the development of rational forms to be one of the most important characteristics of the development of Western society and capitalism. Weber viewed traditional and charismatic forms as irrational, or at least non-rational. The latter may rely on religion, magic, or the supernatural as a way of explaining the social world and authority may also derive from these. These may have no systematic form of development, but may rely on personal insight, revelation, emotions, and feelings, features that are non-rational in form.

In contrast, rationality consists of a set of social actions governed by reason or reasoning, calculation, plus rational pursuit of one’s interests. Rationality forms a large part of rational-legal authority and there are several characteristics that Weber considers as aspects of rationality.  Ritzer borrows heavily and suggests that most social institutions are now governed by the model of rationalization put for by Weber–and can the perfect model for this is seen in the social organization of the fast-food industry, namely McDonalds. He calls this the McDonalidization of society (Ritzer, pp. 124-125).  All major social institutions/formal organizations such as universities, government etc. have most of these characteristics as specified by Weber:

·
Calculability. Results can be calculated or estimated by adopting assumptions and considering the methods by which results will be achieved. This is especially the case in formal institutions or in businesses

·
Efficiency. Actors have various ends and attempt to find the best means to achieving these ends.

·
Predictability. Organizations have rules and regulations, and actors are subject to structures and authority. This, along with established procedures and ends, mean that the results of social action can often be predicted, perhaps not precisely, but certainly probabilities attached to the outcomes.

·
Non-Human Technology. Technologies such as tools, machinery, and information technologies make predictability greater. That is, these technologies are constructed with certain purposes, and so long as they assist in achieving the desired ends, the results are generally predictable.

·
Control Over Uncertainties. This can never be complete, but rules and methods are adopted that deal with many possible contingencies. Rules are set up not so much to deal with specific people or personalities, but attempt to be generic, dealing with a variety of possibilities. These allow outcomes to be constrained within certain limits, thereby reducing uncertainties about outcomes.

These principles of rationality can be applied to many activities and actions in the economic sphere and have become highly developed and visible there. Hyper-formal rationalization might be a better way of describing what has occurred in the development of modern society. In modern society we see these principles for organizing organizations emerge in most areas, even religion, politics, administration, sports, and music. Organizations and actions governed by rationality may produce an overall rationality for the system, but this is not a necessary result. For example, studies of economics show how many producers each acting rationally to maximize their own profits, may produce too many products. As a result, the consequences for people involved in formally rational systems may not always be desirable. That is, there can be IRRATIONAL CONSEQUENCES of rationalization.  While Weber considered rationality to be necessary for organizations to operate efficiently, e felt that the trend was that rationality would may take over more and more spheres of society. Weber feared that this could result in increased control over individual action, stifling charisma and tradition, and allowing few alternatives for creative human action. Lack of choice, lack of creativity, socially organizing the world to emphasize predictability over flexibility (and humanity –loss of substantive rationality) would result in the 
IRON CAGE of rationalization.  

FORMAL RATIONALIZATION AS AN INFLUENCE ON

SOCIAL/POLITICAL/ORGANIZATIONAL LIFE:

THE BUREAUCRACY

Bureaucracies are effective in situations where large numbers of standardized operations are needed, such as processing student enrolments at university and in organizations where little personal initiative is needed to get the job done.

Above all, Weber emphasized that bureaucratic organizations are designed to subdue human affairs to the rule of reason. This would make it possible to conduct the business of the organization “according to calculable rules.”

For people who developed modern organizations, the purpose was to find rational solutions to the new problems of size .

Weber saw bureaucracy as the rational product of social engineering, just as the machines of the Industrial Revolution were the rational products of mechanical engineering.

The more we use it as a way of organizing, the more successful at producing we become….. We are getting better? Or are we? Bigger better?

Weber argued that societies were increasingly
based on formal rationality (that backs rational-legal systems
of authority)

The application of formal rational-legal authority in organizations is bureaucracy, which in its ideal form is the most technically efficient and rational form of organization that has ever existed, argued Weber. 

Key characteristics of bureaucracy as an ideal type are:

specification of jobs with detailed rights, obligations, responsibilities, scope of authority
hierarchical system of supervision and subordination
unity of command where authority resides in the rules not the position
extensive use of written documents –codes of operation
training in job requirements and skills –division of labor according to specialization
application of consistent and complete rules (company manual) impersonality, with everyone treated according to the rules.
assign work and hire personnel based on competence and experience

Problems with Bureaucratization of Social and Cultural Life!!!

The Iron Cage of Rationality
Weber and his pessimistic idea that the result of hyper-rationality would be a society that while seeking the good life becomes incapable of producing the good life through boredom and learned incapacity…

The original German for Iron Cage is Stahlhartes Gehäuse. “shell as hard as steel”.

Social actions were becoming based on efficiency instead of the old types of social actions, which were based on lineage or kinship. Behavior by tradition and dominated by goal-orientation. (e.g., five-year plan, next year’s goals, lol )
Life becomes a series of bureaucracies—everything is increasingly rationalized. Life becomes a predictable series of programs, choice isn’t really choice—it is a menu of strict options set into place by bureaucrats – “Specialists without spirit and Sensualists with out hearts”.

“Rational calculation … reduces every worker to a cog in this bureaucratic machine and, seeing himself in this light, he will merely ask how to transform himself… to a bigger cog… The passion for bureaucratization at this meeting drives us to despair.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsLUidiYm0w (REPITITION LACK OF CREATIVIT AND RULES)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgg9byUy-V4 (MOTIVATION)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7SNEdjftno (FLAIR)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vdcw415OcQ

Problems in Civil Life:
Loss of individual freedom and creativity
in exchange for predictability and security.
Communication is mediated through institutions; large scale bureaucracies and their technologies Social Life is social media life….. Privacy is lost, liberty lost, individuality lost!
CHOICE is NOT True Freedom:
You can have any color car you want so long as it is black, red, blue, white or gray.
You can have coffee any time you want so long as it is Starbucks.
You can take any course you want so long as we are offering it.

From the perspective of organizational design and efficiency, there are three main problems with bureaucracy:

Employee motivation
Customer service
Resistance to innovation and change 

Since bureaucracy is obsessed with rule employees may have little enthusiasm or pride for their jobs, which creates problems of motivation.  If the workforce is poorly motivated then customer service can be poor and the following of rules is not necessarily done with the customer’s best interests in mind.   

Finally, the rigidity of bureaucracies makes them resistant to innovation and change. 

SOME BASIC PROBLEMS THAT ARISE IN THE WORKPLACE FROM BUREAUCRACIES

SOME PERSONAL AND LIFEWORLD PROBLEMS WITH BUREAUCRACIES

Bureaucracy is central to the rise of capitalism because bureaucracies, at least according to Weber, make decisions that are predictable and, hence, amenable to calculation. Indeed, he writes, bureaucracy becomes all the more useful to capitalism the more it “depersonalizes” itself; “i.e., the more completely it succeeds in achieving the exclusion of love, hatred, and every purely personal … feeling from the execution of official tasks.”

Weber says, “For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cloisters into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt…..”

Shoe factory then and now—just bigger & faster

McDonalidization
McDonaldization (or McDonaldisation) is a term used by George Ritzer in his book
The McDonaldization of Society (1995). He describes it as the process by which a society takes on the characteristics of a fast food restaurant. McDonaldization is a reconceptualization of rationalization to hyper-rationalization—even greater rational modes of thought and scientific management. Where Weber used the model of the bureaucracy to represent the direction of this changing society, Ritzer sees the fast-food restaurant as having become the representative contemporary exemplar of social organization – a paradigm of organization in the modern world (Ritzer, 2004:553).

The process of McDonaldization can be summarized as the way in which “the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as of the rest of the world.” (Ritzer, 1993:1). Starbucks?

Ritzer highlighted four primary components of McDonaldization:

Efficiency – the optimal method for accomplishing a task. In this context, Ritzer has a very specific meaning of “efficiency”. Here, the optimal method equates to the fastest method to get from point A to point B.

Calculability – quantifiability of price, product (weight, size, production).

Predictability –
standardized and uniform services. “Predictability” means that no matter where a person goes, they will receive the same service and receive the same product every time when interacting with the McDonaldized organization. This also applies to the workers in those organizations. Their task are highly repetitive, highly routine, and predictable.
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Control over production – standardized and uniform employees, replacement of human by non-human technologies.

Irrationality–with these four processes, a strategy which is rational within a narrow scope can lead to outcomes that are harmful or irrational.

WEBER TRIUMPHS?
“Weberism does not lend itself to the elaboration of an orthodoxy, unless one gives that name to the rejection of all orthodoxies”—even though, it could be argued, it is Weber’s brand of fatalism, rather than Marx’s, that has been vindicated. His writings anticipate both the rise and fall of the Soviet Union—Weber saw planned economies as leading, more or less inevitably, to tyranny—and also the steady, soulless spread of global capitalism. Since 1904, working conditions, at least in the West [certainly not globallyi], have markedly improved, while market efficiencies have produced wealth and comfort on an unprecedented scale for [a subsection of elites].

At the same time, every year brings more evidence that the system obeys its own logic, regardless of what anyone, or for that matter everyone, might wish. The triumph of [ Amazon ], the death of the family farm, the flow of blue-collar jobs to Juárez and white-collar jobs to Bangalore: all are developments that in their equivocal character—from one perspective supremely rational and from another self-defeating—are consistent with Weber’s notions of progress and the futility of trying (or even wanting to try) to resist it.

From article by Elizabeth Kolbert 2004. In the New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/11/29/why-work

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Homework 2 The Iron Cage – Due

For this homework, you will use Weber’s iron cage concept and Ritzer’s model of McDonaldization to assess to what degree TCU is an Iron Cage of Rationality / AKA—A McDonaldized organization. Examine your experience as a student at TCU. Examine a particular aspect of your student experience (selecting and working on a major, registration/advising, the core curriculum, or other aspect). For this dimension of life apply Ritzer’s model (efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control), and rate on a scale from 0 to 10 the extent to which the institution is McDonaldized (each dimension), where 0 represents no emphasis on efficiency whatsoever (or calculability, predictability, or control) and 10 represents total and complete emphasis on efficiency.

After you have presented your case for each of the four characteristics for the dimension of student life, discuss overall to what degree TCU is an Iron Cage of Rationality– that is does TCU’s rationalization produce irrationalities of rationality. If so, how  and if not, how does TCU avoid this?  Does TCU resist McDonaldization / The Iron Cage.