A McDonalized Society

           

           We are in danger of being seduced by the advantages that rationalization has already offered and promised in the future. It’s true. Cooking from scratch has become rare today. Much use is made of prepackaged meals, frozen TV dinners, and mostly fast-food restaurants. Almost all retailers are oriented toward increasing efficiency, and I can think of many entities, that I engage with, that have become McDonalized. 

            McDonaldization believes that almost any task can and should be rationalized. It sounds pretty good. After all, being more efficient is a good thing. Consisted, exact and measurable outcomes also sound good. So, what's the problem? It turns out that over-rationalizing a process in this manner has an unexpected side effect: irrationality. 

            I personally prefer family-owned restaurants, but the charm of TV dinners and fast-food restaurants is that they are highly predictable. On one hand, I know that it will taste exactly the same from one time to another and it will cost me the same from one city to another. I never cook from scratch: there are too many ingredients and variables involved in the cookbook. And I can’t guarantee I will like it. Even music has become McDonaldized with the expansion of technology. I have two thousand songs in my pocket. And many other customs have been made more predictable.

But on the other hand, I complain about the quality and the danger of the products.

Yet the facts remain that they are all shaped by the drive for efficiency, and that is a major problem in a rationalizing society. The emphasis on quantity rather than quality is a main concern. 

                 McDonald’s tells us it has sold many billions of hamburgers, rather than telling us about the quality of those burgers. There are many examples of the effort to substitute quantity for quality in the world. For example, in the industrial world, we are minimizing time for each task, we are lowering the price of the finished product, and we are increasing the sales, ultimately, to increase profits. We are using rational technologies to control individual independence to eventually replace human beings with machines that lack the ability to think and act in unpredictable ways. You’ve probably noticed the self-checkout stands at the grocery store. Have you called your wireless provider lately? Most companies have turned to using automated telephone operators. There isn’t much online banking and an ATM that a teller cannot do. And once people are reduced to a few robot-like actions, it becomes easy to replace them with mechanical robots.

             Moreover, McDonald’s uses specific methods to prepare the food and to to serve it in order to have great control over its employees. And a rational society also uses control over its consumers. It attracts us. The irrationality of rationality is the byproduct of the process of rationalization. It is seen as the opposite of rationality. Rationality brings with it great dehumanization as people are reduced to acting like robots. It tends to take much of the mystery and excitement. Overall, a fully rational society would be a very isolated and uninteresting place. It is apparent that our social lives have drastically changed over the past years.

            Although progressive rationalization has brought with it innumerable advantages, it has also created a number of problems which threaten to accelerate in the years to come. Rationalization is occurring throughout America. More and more emphasis is placed on efficiency, predictability, the replacement of human by nonhuman technology, and control over uncertainty. It is not possible to fight against this. However, controlling the process of rationalization is much needed as well as increasing the efforts to improve its irrational consequences. 

           Put your money where your mouth is.