mcdonaldization theory and its critics

Jeet Heer jeet at sturdynet.com
Sun Feb 9 08:26:28 PST 2003


A while back I asked people on this list about the survival of regional cuisine in the era of fast foods. The fruits of the discussion inform this essay, which appeared in today's Boston Globe. (link and short excerpt below).

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/040/focus/True_Grits+.shtml True Grits Forget McDonaldization: In the age of Krispy Kreme and Burritoville, fast-food chains may help preserve regional identity

By Jeet Heer and Steve Penfold, 2/9/2003

NOT TOO LONG AGO, McDonald's seemed invincible. Not only did the fast-food giant serve burgers by the billions, its social influence appeared unstoppable. "The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross," maintained Eric Schlosser in his best-selling 2001 expos "Fast Food Nation." "The basic thinking behind fast food has become the operation system of today's retail economy, wiping out small businesses, obliterating regional differences, and spreading identical stores throughout the country like a self-replicating code."

Schlosser was popularizing an argument made by University of Maryland sociologist George Ritzer, author of the influential book "The McDonaldization of Society" (1993). McDonaldization, according to Ritzer, is "the process by 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."

********* Students of the globalized Golden Arches (about 43 percent of McDonald's nearly 30,000 franchises lie outside the United States) frequently stress that the chain is in fact remarkably flexible in responding to local conditions. Like the most successful missionaries of old, McDonald's has achieved international reach by adapting itself to the idioms and mores of different climes. You can eat McFelafels in Egypt, an egg-topped McHuevos burger in Uruguay, and a McLuks salmon burger in Finland.

More fundamentally, scholars increasingly dispute the idea that mass production threatens the existence of particular cultural identities, either abroad or at home. After all, regional cuisines are displaying an unexpected vitality in this age of chain restaurants and global brand-names. Why? Many people, it seems, are content to preserve their local cultures through food that is as processed and mass-produced as a Happy Meal.

Harvard anthropologist James L. Watson has spent more than a decade studying the McDonald's restaurants of East Asia. He emphasizes the ways that different cultures find diverse uses for the same product. In China, where teenagers suffer a dearth of social spaces, McDonald's is an appealing place for high school students to spend hours goofing off. Even Ronald McDonald cuts a different profile in family-conscious China, where he is known as Uncle McDonald and has a spouse, Aunt McDonald. As in many developing countries, the novelty and relatively high prices of McDonald's make it a symbol of chicness and new wealth.

The startling mutability of McDonald's is part of a larger story. "Ordinary people link their regional identities to commercial food products," notes Donna Gabaccia, a professor of American history at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. "Most fast food restaurant chains start in a specific location and when they spread, they take their regional identity with them-even KFC, which did originate in Kentucky."



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