Mc Donaldization (écrit en anglais)

Thèmes abordés

Mc Donaldization; culture; mondialisation; économie

Résumé du document

Ce document (en anglais) décrit en détail le concept de Mc Donaldization décrit par le sociologue Georges Ritzer. Il explique comment les restaurants Mc Donalds ont tiré profit de la mondialisation et ont développé un nouveau concept qui sera ensuite repris dans le monde entier. Ce document s'adresse autant aux étudiants en économie qu'à ceux qui s'intéressent au concept de culture populaire.

Extraits

[...] (McDonald's posts sizzling 80% profit rise in 2008". Breitbart.com. 2009-01-26). In 2007 Mc Donald's revenue was over $ 22.8 billion. Mc Donald's restaurants are found in 119 countries. It has over 31,000 restaurants worldwide, employing more than 1.5 million people. (http://www.mcdonalds.ca). If Mc Donald's is so successful it's because it was one of the first restaurants chains to use the methods of the Industrial Revolution in the sector of restaurants. I mean that we find in Mc Donalds the standardization and specialization of production like Taylor and Ford theorized it. [...]

[...] The choice is made very quickly and there is not that much diversity in the proposed items. Then we arrive to the cash desk. Usually when we ask for a sandwich it is already made and we wait no more than 5 minutes to have our meal. Then we can eat it and because we already have all the elements of the meal we eat it very fast thus we are rapidly full. The second component of McDonaldization is calculability. For McDonalds quantity is better than quality. [...]

[...] They are specialized in one function (for instance to cook the beef). McDonalds also tries to replace human capital by material capital. Alan Bryman in The Disneyization of society talks about the emotional labour as a new characteristics of “McJobs”. The employees of McDonalds have to show the emotions that people want to see during transactions. The way they feel is also controlled in order to satisfy the client who wants to see happy people. In my opinion the employees doesn't seem really happy in McDonalds so I'm not sure that this concept is very relevant, in France or in the Netherlands it is the same there are rarely cheerful. [...]

[...] McDonalds also takes part in the standardization of cultures. It is present everywhere and it is always the same, it doesn't help to discover new taste cultures but brings a competition too hard for the small restaurants. If we look at the “McJobs” through a Marxist lens, we can say that this type of work dehumanizes workers. Indeed they have to do always the same things, the same movements as if they were some machines. Even their feelings are controlled so they lost their agency which characterizes every human being. [...]

[...] It means that wherever you go you will always know what you can find in a McDonalds. The products are always the same even if there are small variations between countries. For instance there are more or less five different products between France and the Netherlands. The name of the burgers are the same, thus when I first arrived in Amsterdam I already knew precisely what I was going to eat before entering in McDonalds. Finally the last concept is control which is exercised on the forces of production. [...]