...Mechanical (rather than human) means are to be used to move the car (and parts) from one step in the assembly process to the next....Complex sets of movements are eliminated and the worker does 'as nearly as possible only one thing with one movement' "(Ibid, 59).
Calculability "involves an emphasis on things that can be calculated, counted, quantified. It means a tendency to use quantity as a measure of quality. This leads to a sense that quality is equal to certain, usually (but not always) large quantities of things" (Ibid, 62) itzer points out that this was an approach from McDonald's early days. He cites evidence of the Big Mac as a name for a burger: big burger must be desirable, that "consumers are lead to believe that they are getting a large amount of food for a small expenditure of money. Calculating consumers come away with the feeling that they…...

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References

Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society - an Investigation Into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life. Newbury Park: Pine Forge Press. 1993.

A white collar worker at the managerial level may find it difficult to market him or herself as unique outside of the corporate hierarchy after being downsized. Even physicians, plumbers, and other individuals that practice certain 'trades' may find their professions standardized and their skill's inherent worth downgraded, as franchised service industries become more popular. Jiffy Lube has replaced the independent mechanic just like Starbucks has replaced the corner coffee shop.
Another interesting point is the actual inefficiency of these supposedly efficient structures. Cars supposedly make it easier for us to travel long distances, yet we get caught in traffic jams. Fast food is cheap, yet much more expensive and less nutritious than if we made these foods at home. Fast food also makes us unhealthy, raising our healthcare costs. The demand for predictability saps our creative skills, what makes us uniquely human -- even our schools and colleges are…...

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Works Cited

"George Ritzer." Ailun. April 16, 2009.

http://www.scienzesociali.ailun.it/st/docenti/ritzer.shtml

Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. 5th edition. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press,

McDonaldization
Ritzer ends Chapter 2 with the example of the limited success of McDonaldizing the climbing of Mt. Everest. Explain why McDonaldization has been limited in the case of Everest. Using information from this section, develop your own example of a phenomenon where you think McDonaldization has been limited. Include an explanation of why you think this is so.

The McDonalization of Everest is an example of a situation that is too complex and irregular to be subject to the full breadth of the trend. To McDonaldize the accent of Everest, climbers fast-tracked the normal acclimation process, hired ill-trained guides, and relied on oxygen to support their journey. Climbers also relied on helicopters to provide a new starting point as well as a bunch of modern equipment to support the trip such as cell phones and computers. Although this opened the mountain to a new class of tourist, it also made the…...

On the part of the customer, s/he saves effort and time by just browsing through web pages to buy the merchandise or products that s/he needs.
The second principle, calculability, pertains to the quantified nature of products or services offered to consumers. This practice is not only popular to enterprises that sell consumer goods, but it is also a popular practice in the services sector. Productivity of an employee in a communications center may be determined through a system wherein the number of calls received and dialed are monitored. In addition to this measure, an individual's productivity may also be assessed through the number of hours spent working in the office, determined through a time-keeping system.

The third principle, predictability is the implementation of standard behavior and actions, in order to make tasks faster and easier to conduct. This principle is evident in the adoption of standardized, formalized greetings that salespeople…...

In sum, rationalization has institutionalized McDonald's and made it and its principles of standardization a part of every American's life.
However, it is also important to note that Ritzer attempts to provide a critical analysis of the whole McDonaldization process: that, while McDonald's have become an icon of the American society for the contemporary period, it has also become the symbol for the furthering of irrationality of the society as well. This claim is evidently a paradox, since what McDonaldization has brought to society is actually a move towards irrationality, wherein every action of individuals has become mechanical and standardized. Critical theorists (and Ritzer) consider this process as "dehumanization." Instead of giving people their full potential in enhancing their skills and knowledge at work, the prevalence of "scripted interaction" in almost every transaction conducted in capitalist societies have resulted to dehumanization as people are merely taught to memorize lines, actions,…...

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Bibliography

Ritzer, G. (2000). The McDonaldization of Society. CA: Pine Forge Press.

Sociology
"McDonaldization"

What are the principles that "McDonaldization" (George Ritzer's term) impose on our lives?

The principles of McDonaldization are efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. Efficiency with respect to this term means the best way to perform a task or complete an activity. The priority is to create the best mode of production for a product or service. The ability to be unique or show individuality is discouraged and affects the industrial conception of efficiency in a bad way. The priority is the product, not the people. Calculability is the ability to quantify factors and situations. The priority is the quantity of the product rather than the quality of the product. Predictability is the trait of the production process that ensures uniformity among the products. Predictability takes out the element of surprise and of innovation. All products look precisely the same. It is predictable, yet boring. Control refers to substituting robots or other…...

McDonalidization is creating automated, highly efficient, quantifiable, and homogenized processes and systems. The term refers to the fast food chain but can be witnessed in almost every area of life, from education to entertainment. McDonaldization arguably began with assembly-line production, long before fast food existed. The trend has permeated much more than the industrial domain, and has impacted the ways people live their lives. Although McDonaldization has some benefits, such as increased efficiency, predictability, and standardization, the detriments to McDonalidization include dehumanization, immorality, lack of creativity, and loss of soul.
McDonaldization provides the illusion of saving time, because processes are automated. Many companies find that McDonaldization is necessary for them to meet performance standards or turn a profit. For some companies, it becomes critical to manage supply chains in a way that requires bulk purchasing. A mechanized workforce, literally and figuratively, is also part of the McDonaldization process. Some workforces are…...

Living in Modernity in Three Easy Steps
Perhaps it is only appropriate that a so-called guidebook to living in modernity is not in fact a book at all, but only a relatively brief overview, encompassing six to nine pages of text, easily condensed for the reader's evaluation into three easy steps. It is short. It can be potentially read and interpreted by a variety of individuals with varying levels of literacy. It is democratic and addresses the reader as part of a collective, but not as someone who is of a particular gender or social or professional hierarchy. It is friendly to those whose attention spans have been shortened by the Internet and the mass media, yet it also creates a program that is inspirational in nature, to the reader's sense of improving the self. It wishes the reader to become a better self, just like everyone else in the…...

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Works Cited

Charon, Joel. (2000). Ten Questions: A Sociological Perspective. New York: Wadsworth.

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." (2003). NBC Television Show.

Ritzer, Geroge. (2002). McDonaldization of Society. Pine Forage Press.

Schor, Juliet. (1998). The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need.

Another means in which Southwest Airlines resembles McDonald's is given by the very use of the onald McDonald House for charity events. McDonald's has been developing charity actions through sustained donations to the charity houses for nearly four decades now (Website of the onald McDonald House Charities). As of 1983, when a Southwest Airlines pilot lost his daughter to leukemia, the airline operator has also been annually donating money to the charity. Additionally, the company also volunteers employees to help in the charity houses (Airline Industry Information, 2005).

These actions of Southwest can be assessed from two distinct angles -- both similar to the angles of assessing the charity decisions of McDonald's. In this order of ideas, the first angle is constituted by the fact that the companies become respectable members of the community. They show their support to community causes and they are socially responsible by giving back to the…...

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References:

Durlabhji, S., 1990, The influence of Confucianism and Zen on the Japanese organization, Akron Business and Economic Review, Edition of June

2005, Southwest Airlines celebrates 20 years of partnership with McDonald's Houses, Airline Industry Information, Edition of October

Website of the McDonald's Corporation,   last accessed on October 21, 2010http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/home.html 

Website of the Ronald McDonald House Charities,   / last accessed on October 21, 2010http://rmhc.org 

subordination of labor" a necessary condition for establishing an employment relationship? Are there other necessary conditions?
The capitalist take-over of production was at first merely formal. Capitalists took control of production methods via ownership and employed workers in their privately owned factories. Workers agreed to labor for the owners, because they believed that this was a more financially and socially beneficial relationship than working for their own farms, on their own privately owned land. The formal subordination of labor to capital thus is necessary in a situation of private enterprise, where labor can be rented cheaply to work on preexisting property owned by capitalists.

Why is the "real subordination of labor" described as a fundamental aspect of management? How does the unique nature of the human factor make this form of subordination problematic?

It is only later, in part under the pressure of workers' struggles, when capitalists begin to invest heavily in…...

" In one supreme irony, as McDonald's makes Americans less healthy, McDonald's as a company is dependant on poorly-paid workers who receive few benefits, including healthcare. The workers are disposable as the food and the packaging they assemble for McDonald's patrons. It is in the company's interest not to keep them employed for long, so they remain part-time employees without real healthcare. They learn no skills and do not improve their promotional prospects. And often the only food they can afford, lacking adequate facilities or time to prepare a meal, is a McDonald's meal.
The slaughterhouses where the processed meats that go into McDonald's hamburgers are just as mechanized as McDonald's drive-through, only the cows that move through their doors do not exit intact. Yet the fate of the human executors of these cows is almost as terrible. Working conditions in slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants are dangerous. The workers are often…...

They think about the break, they go on the break and the come back thinking about the passed break and waiting to the future one. By the time they focus on the actual task, the next break is up. But if they get two breaks, of 30 minutes each, then they will not constantly interrupt their work and the efficiency would increase.
Setting stricter deadlines, but -- as a manager -- being prepared for them to be delayed. This strategy is useful as the stress of an upcoming deadline will often press the employees to be more active and efficient (Schilling, 2007). This does not mean that the employees would be exploited, only that the time allocated to procrastination is decreased.

Developing and implementing a reward system, based on performances. In other words, it would be necessary for the managers at the Junction Hotel to evaluate the efficiency of each individual…...

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References:

Chapman, A., 2010, Frederick Herzberg's motivation and hygiene factors, Business Balls,   last accessed on July 19, 2011http://www.businessballs.com/herzberg.htm 

Cullinane, K., 2011, International handbook of maritime economics, Edward Elgar Publishing, ISBN 1847209335

Griffin, R.W., Moorhead, G., 2009, Organisational behavior: managing people and organisations, 9th edition, Cengage Learning, ISBN 0547167334

Knorr, A., Arndt, A., 2003, Why did Wal-Mart fail in Germany? Institute for World Economics and International Management,   last accessed on July 19, 2011http://www.iwim.uni-bremen.de/publikationen/pdf/w024.pdf 

McDonaldization
Directly linked with cultural globalization and actually deriving from the basic concepts at the forefront of globalized culture - glocalization and grobalization - is McDonaldization. The term is generically used to present the strategies implemented by the American fast food chain in 'conquering' the world, strategies which are now more broadly applied by other companies in various industries. And their strategies are worth analyzing. In ussia for instance, the company's success is given by their early penetration of the market (only a few months after the fall of the Soviet egime) and by their choice to personally run their operations (unlike Subway, KFC or other American emblems which used franchising and failed in ussia). Penetration of the ussian market was a difficult task for the company at least from a legislative stand point, which demands foreign companies to go through 20 or 30 agencies and get between 50 and…...

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References

Hernandez-Diaz, R.J. Summer 2004. The Globalization of Nothing and the McDonaldization of the Church. The SEMI, Issue One

Ritzer, George. 2007. The Globalization of Nothing 2., Second Revised Edition, Pine Forge Press

Ritzer, George, 2007, the McDonaldization of Society, Fifth Edition, Pine Forge Press

Rothkop, David. June 22, 1997. In Praise of Cultural Imperialism? Effects of Globalization on Culture. Foreign Policy

count includes cover page, abstract, table contents, list references appendices; place supporting material exceeds word limit appendices.
Ray Kroc's organizational process of 'McDonaldization' and the birth of the American franchise

One of the great ironies of McDonald's is that a company whose name is synonymous with standardization was actually quite a unique invention when it was born in the mind of the great innovator and entrepreneur Ray Kroc. Kroc was so successful at patenting his formula for creating cheap, predictable burgers, fries and milkshakes that his company's golden arches became an icon of Americana. The word McDonaldization has come to refer to the extent to which "the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world," in the words of sociologist George Ritzer (Waters 1998). Rationalization, efficiency, predictability, calculability, and control, according to Ritzer, are the…...

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Bibliography

Keel, Robert. 2010. The McDonaldization of society. Sociology Home Page. Accessed:

  22, 2011]http://www.umsl.edu/~keelr/010/mcdonsoc.html [April

Kuratko, D.F. (2009). Entrepreneurship: Theory, process, practice. 8th edition. Mason, OH:

South Western Cengage Learning.

The mother and grandmother responded to being observed by facial expressions of disapproval, but these were short lived, and both women became more focused on their plates and the child, ignoring that they were being observed. This was an amazing defense mechanism, a false consciousness, which that allowed them to continue manifesting their disorder in a public setting. It was difficult not to experience a sense of empathy for the child, who would no doubt become a product of habitus, or a product of her environment. She is a young child whose own destiny has been sidetracked by her mother's and grandmother's overeating maladies.

Today, the term "McDonaldization" has been applied to the system and syndromes revolving around the fast food industry (Cohen, . And Kennedy, P. 2000, Global Sociology, MacMillan, London, p. 378). However, the hypothesis that is presented here, as a result of this observation study, is that a…...

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Reference List

Henslin, J.M., (DATE), Essentials of Sociology a Down to Earth Approach by. Henslin 7th Edition, (PUBLISHER).

Cohen, R. And Kennedy, P. 2000, Global Sociology, MacMillan, London.

WWLTV.com, 2008, found online at:   retrieved 29 January 2008.http://www.wwltv.com/local/stories/wwl010208tpbuffetfight__.1c12476.html ,