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The McDonaldization of Society. New Century ed. George Ritzer. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. 2000. 278 pages. $21.95.
Pine Forge Press has recently released a new edition of this now famous work, as most readers of Teaching Sociology probably know. Ritzer's book was in fact the first title Pine Forge published, and it proved to be a big winner. According to the company, there are now over 100,000 copies of the book in print; it has been adopted in "hundreds" of courses across the United States, primarily in sociology, but also in English departments and business schools. The book has been translated into nine languages, with more translations now being developed in Chinese, Croatian, Korean, Greek and Japanese. Many teachers who do not require the whole book do assign excerpts, and the concept of McDonaldization has entered the vocabulary of many introductory sociology textbooks.
The 1993 book touched a cultural nerve; the process of McDonaldization is becoming a broader and deeper part of the experience of our students as well as their teachers. In simple, evocative language the term itself cleverly synthesizes many observations and trends being explored in more sophisticated or arcane disciplinary venues. The book both draws students into the field and opens them to the depths of the discipline in powerful ways. Beyond the classroom, McDonaldization is one of the rare examples of a complex sociological idea that successfully crossed over into the public consciousness, through journalism for example, as Ritzer himself partially documents in his second endnote. He has clearly served our field as both a specialized scholar and public intellectual.
With this context in mind, what about the new edition? I find it a bit daunting to discuss-after all, how does one review a phenomenon? I wrote the TS review of the original 1993 edition and thought the book would do well as an instructional tool. It did better than well, that's for sure, in many senses. But for the purposes of this journal review, the criterion I will use to analyze the new edition is still how effectively it will work with undergraduate sociology students.
The new edition retains Ritzer's fundamental purpose, which is to develop a Weberian analysis of rationalization running amok not only within bureaucratized workplaces...