Link to mock final

The exam is on Tuesday morning, December 10. The class chose to do the small group re-take, so the individual exam will start at 10:00 am, the group re-test starting at the latest by 11:45 and ending at 12:45 pm (there may be another class waiting to start a final from 1-3). You need to be in class (excepting those who’ve made arrangements with the DSO)–there are no last-minute excuses for not being able to attend for the final exam.

Remember, this is a guide, not a blueprint. At the end are some practice questions to get you thinking about the issues and how to approach them. You’ll have more success if you approach these issues–McDonaldization, social control, framing war and terrorism, 1984, from a social problems perspective.

You already know my advice on the shortcomings of memorization as a study strategy. And sleep (at least 7 hours the night prior, to allow the brain to consolidate memory. The exam will test what you’ve learned, as demonstrated by your ability to apply the learning to relevant examples. Not what you’ve memorized; what you’ve learned. So as you study, find ways to connect ideas and concepts–the more things they ‘stick’ to or attach in the brain, the more likely you’ll be to retrieve them, and to create some recognizable structure. Think of how a house is a hard structure to recognize if it’s strewn about the yard in a giant pile of building materials, for instance.

So …. definitely check out the lecture pages, especially for subjects where you need some back-up (e.g., understanding how to apply McDonaldization far afield from the fast food restaurant examples).

Also, if you’re entitled to accommodations, let me know and set that up with the DSO. You’ll need to schedule it early enough that you can come back for the group re-test, if you want to take that (meaning finishing and heading back to Ackerman by 11:30 or so). If you’re speaking English as a second or third language, talk to me about using the testing center to minimize distraction. 

McDonaldization

• Roots of McDonaldization—where did it come from? What makes rationalization such a powerful idea over 100 years later? Why does it seem practically an irreversible trend?
• Understand the four basic principles of McDonaldization, and be able to apply them, distinguish them from one another, and apply them outside the fast food biz.
• Be able to discuss how or whether McDonaldization is a social problem, how the metaphor of a cage helps explain this, or how it might be addressed.
• How can something designed to be so rational become irrational?
• Do companies face pressures to McDonaldize? Why? (go back to what makes McD so revolutionary)
• Why is much of Ritzer’s book concerned with the issues of consumption and private gain (that is, profit)?
• Remember we’re trying to take this beyond the fast food example, so it would be good to think about how McDonaldization has crept into almost every nook and cranny of American society.
• The outlines we go over in class will be useful (wk 6; wk 7; wk 8).

Orwell and 1984

• 1984 was a drastic example for showing how different definitions or ‘frames’ of a problem can lead to different action. The reader and the Ingsoc party are likely to have different views about the big problems Oceania faces. How can a specific ‘frame’ (e.g., terrorist threats) be used to promote a specific agenda or policy (e.g, war)? How does the question of ‘who benefits’ help to explain how problems are framed for public consumption? What’s the key to influencing how the public perceives the problem?
• You should be able to discuss possible parallels with contemporary US society, but using a social problems After the paper, this shouldn’t be difficult.
• Key concepts include Big Brother (surveillance and the protective leader), information control (over media, for instance, much of what the outer party members’ jobs entailed), doublespeak (use or abuse of language) and doublethink, perpetual war (the fear factor), torture, the relationship between war and the economy, the class differences and how the ruling class tailored its control, propaganda (e.g., the two minutes’ hate), etc. You should think about the relationship between these and social control–how do they work to control the population? How was control of information and media important, and how different from media bias in our own society?
• The connection with war, terrorism and the military industrial complex. Even poverty (the ‘Victory mansions,’ huge ‘defense’ expenditures). How can a government convince the public to go to war, does the military industrial complex pose a social problem and/or increase the likelihood of war? Are there any similarities between 1984 and the Cold War and the ‘War on terror?’ And are there any parallels with Orwell’s dystopian society in 1984?
• Classroom outline on concepts would be useful for those things we’ve discussed in class.
• We still have superpowers today, the US is part of one of them. ‘Eurasia’ is currently at war. ‘Eastasia’ is in some sort of shifting alliance, but has similar expansionist plans. And lest we think the US has no expansion history, think about how many military bases we have throughout the world, troops deployed (in some cases involved in covert operations).
• Outline (from class)

Framing war and terrorism

• We have cut back some of the readings and coverage from this part of the course. Tying this to the Military Industrial Complex, war, and to 1984, would be useful for you–in how governments frame external threats and concepts like ‘terrorism.’
• How much of the US budget is spent on defense/security? Why is it so hard to reduce military spending? And considering it’s a budget issue, money spent on military/defense/security/war is money not spent on other things, which should remind you of a certain novel you should have read recently.

Putting it together

• Orwell’s book is obviously in large part about heavy-handed social control in a society. McDonaldization deals with control to some extent, doesn’t it? After all, two of the four principles are ‘control’ and ‘predictability’. But it’s not the same coercive kind of control. Completely different means … but to similar outcomes? Do war and terrorism fit in this picture? If McDonaldization is a form of social control, how? How is it different from the control described in Orwell’s Oceania?
• Does this all mean that people can embrace social control (and a lack of agency or free will)–since McDonaldization is pretty popular? Are AI and algorithms giving people more of what they seem to want, or are they influencing our tastes, desires, and choices? Is it control if it doesn’t appear coercive?

Social problems

Remember the point of this class–to give you different ways to analyze social problems. Week 1 readings have reference sources for you in the lecture material. For any of the above content areas of the course, you should be able to go through some of the key questions we ask when doing this (the key questions are littered through various other pages of this web site … ). I may also ask you how one area (e.g., McDonaldization) might relate to another (e.g., war, terrorism, social control). This won’t be covering new ground–it will be things we’ve either discussed in class, or you’ve seen in readings or lecture material. Also, if you look at all of the above bullet points as separate, this seems overwhelming. Many of them are connected and were part of the same discussion. 

It seems like one of the most difficult parts of the social problems analysis for people is the ‘framing,’ or ‘ownership’ — who ‘owns’ the debate, who has the power to define the debate and influence public opinion, how do they do it, etc. You can bet that this is tied not only with who is benefiting/being harmed, but what suggestions are for what should be done about it, and who should do it.

But we focused in the last week on what to do about social problems. As individuals (citizens, consumers), structurally (can markets and prices influence behavior, taxation, laws and policies), organizations and institutions (social movements, activism, etc.), especially governments.

You should have a more sophisticated view of this that reflects these discussions, the readings and the wide variety of ways that social problems are addressed, and that change does happen, despite the fairly relentless pressure against by those who hold power of some sort.

A few suggestions . . . just keep in mind, this is a social problems class, so I’m going to ask you about that, probably on the last question, and you might want to run through the topics we’ve discussed post-midterm, using that pesky framework. I mentioned earlier in the class the reasons I chose these specific issues. McDonaldization is a chance to apply a theory (so you should know the principles and the underlying concept of rationalization), but it’s also unique in that we’re talking about our lives resembling (figuratively) a fast food restaurant, so understanding how a restaurant can be McDonaldized might help you understand how to take it beyond fast food.

As for Orwell and war, it seems important to how the party and government controls the population–through fear, hatred of an enemy (which could be the Brotherhood, Goldstein, Eurasia and/or Eastasia), but also through patriotism and nationalistic pride (e.g., the fabulously popular line of ‘Victory’ products). It also seems to help explain the relationship between war and poverty and inequality.

As for the matching, the McDonaldization principles and some of the stuff from 1984 would lend themselves pretty well to that, so I would spend some time getting them down, not just memorizing information, but actually trying to come up with your own examples of how they work.

Practice final questions (asked by students preparing for the exam, from a previous term …)

Just some ‘intellectual guidance’ for you . . . these are questions students prepping for the exam emailed me in past terms:

Why is McDonaldization such a powerful trend in the world, even if McDonald’s the corporation is losing market share in the fast food industry?

Because it’s such an unscrupulous business model, it’s made lots of executives and investors lots of money, and it really cuts down on labor costs. Your job here would be to fill in the details as to how it does these things. McDonald’s business model was so successful, that it’s been adopted in most every sector of the economy by some percentage of the businesses (remember, some market themselves as anti-McDonald’s, as focusing on quality). Lots of competition, but as society becomes more complex, the process still offers advantages, and certain people or groups will step in to try to seize them. Now we’re getting into the social problems arena.

When we say that the world is becoming more like a McDonald’s restaurant, what does that mean?

Think about what McDonald’s does, what you saw when you went to observe. How workers are treated, how they’re expected to behave or to perform on the job, what they’re expected to know, how they’re paid, how customers are treated, the quality of the standardized products it produces, and perhaps–think about this one–the effects on people. Does McDonaldization affect people in similar ways, even if what they’re consuming isn’t high-carb/high-fat food, but something else (e.g., mass-produced art, pop music, or gastric bypass surgery at the local surgicenter)? Use the restaurant model as a way to think about other possible problems with McDonaldization–how workers are treated, controlled, paid, the quality of products or services, the cost and profit issues, predictability, etc. Education, health care, auto repair, hair cutting / manicures, art, music, political campaigns, news . . . lots of ways to practice thinking about this social process.

Could a political party take over in the U.S. the way Ingsoc ruled Oceania? 

Well, possibly not in the near future. But who controls the parties?

Obviously, there are huge differences between the two countries. That’s not to say that some of the elements of Oceania don’t exist in the US today. What’s perhaps more ironic is that, even though information inconsistent with the government’s policies exists, only an extremely small minority bothers to seek it out, the majority instead depending on information from corporate news media outlets that ‘filter’ out or gloss over hundreds of news stories that might adversely affect powerful interests.

Is there a difference between McDonaldization and rationalization? Some rationalization is ok, normal, necessary, but as it becomes irrational it is considered Mcdonaldized? Or Mcdonaldized is irrational? Or I’m completely off base? 

A quick-lube would be McDonaldized (in and out very quickly, low-wage “grease monkeys”, no knowledge or training really necessary … ). But an automotive repair facility would have rational/expected/necessary organizational procedures in place without being so impersonal and quick, upselling and rushing customers through, workers having minimal training & certifications, for instance.

As we discussed in class, everyone to some extent considers making certain things they do more efficient. Businesses are built around efficiencies that either save money or generate profit. McDonaldization is simply a specific kind of rationalization–based on Ritzer’s analysis of the fast food industry, and the principles that he has identified. For instance, Henry Ford’s Model T was built on an assembly line, but it wasn’t necessarily built in a way that it was cheap and unsafe. Fast food is ‘cheap’ only because the industry is able to externalize so many costs (which is a good way to think about some of the ‘irrational’ consequences of McDonaldization). But it’s not the healthiest food, and the quantity/quality thing is pretty basic to McDonaldization. There is a compromise between mass production and quality.

Not all industries are the same, though. Ford mass-produced cars, and realized efficiencies that made them less expensive and more readily available to the masses. But they had to achieve some threshold of safety and functioning. And that becomes more important as cars get faster and bigger, and highways and cities more congested. Most people buy cars a lot less frequently than hamburgers. Same with houses and building codes. we want them to be safe. Compare that to these corporate executives from Druthers talking about making the deluxe quarter in this video–talk about rationalizing a process and people patting each other on the back for following it (and for exploiting their workforce with Orwellian management gems like ‘mental wages’). Total efficiency and calculability, but also control of how the sandwich is made, leading to a (presumably) predictable culinary outcome. But uniformly mediocre. Combined with minimal training of the workforce (allowing for companies to save on labor costs and deal with high turnover). Hence the need for lots of marketing, packaging. Few industries spend more on advertising than fast food, which is very competitive. They’re not making Victory Burgers, but if we were mired in world war III, they might be.

McDonaldization is a subset of the much broader historical process of rationalization. Bureaucracies are not McDonaldized, but they emerge and develop as responses to increasing size and complexity and a need to solve problems in different ways in order to maintain some semblance of social order. So no, McDonaldization isn’t simply irrational rationalization. McDonaldization can function quite well, but in the extreme (like the example of 20 cars in the drive thru lane and an empty dining area), can create irrational outcomes. Having well-paid master mechanics is a different way to organize a garage. Jobs likely take longer, and they’re more expensive because the mechanics have more skill and experience. So if you need an oil change, maybe Jiffy Lube or its equivalent is fine. If you’re not sure what’s going on with the car, maybe you should be wary of the upsell.