Sociology 1020-Lecture Seven Social Organization
This lecture looks at social organizations. I emphasize the work of George Ritzer. His thesis on the McDonaldization of society is an important critique of our contemporary lifestyles and social order. We look at the nature of modern society including the rise of formal organizations (bureaucracies), multinational corporations, professionalization, and the McDonaldization of society.
As we have seen individuals live in many contexts. The 20th century is best characterized by the rise of formal organizations. The existence of large organizations has a number of consequences for our lives. The large organization dominates the prison, military, hospital, corporations, and churches.
In a single generation many of us have gone from working in local community in a factory to operating inside of a multinational corporation which operates in several parts of the world. Our lifestyles, consumer habits, and social relationships reflect large organizations. Organizations have a life of their own. They operate as systems of power and control. They also impact the choices we make.
I. Multinationals
A multinational is a corporation operating in more than one country. They have over 100,000 subsidiaries around the world. They control 90 percent of all commodities exported by the Third World. The top 500 corporations control 70 percent of world trade. The largest corporations control more resources than and negotiate with more power than most countries. They control entire industries, manufacturing processes, mineral resource extraction processes, and banking (Craig 1997).
Often corporations are linked terrible events. A good example of corporate power is the Bhopal, India where a gas leak at the multinational Union Carbide killed 3,000 people in 1984. The company paid $470 in compensation to each family (Craig 1997:21) Everyday corporations control processes linking social groups across cultures. The Maquiladoras (factories on the Mexican border) situation overviewed earlier in the text is a good example. We can see the impact of corporations in many ways. They provide jobs and development. But at what costs? The costs to society are called externalities or unintended consequences. We often measure the outcome of profit making in economic ways. Profit versus loss for instance. Yet we can see the connections between multinationals and social problems.
II. Formal Organizations
Organizations are based on goals. A church has different goals than a cult or a corporation. Yet at the same time they are organized forms of human behavior. Fast food corporations have become a major employer and cultural icon. They are run much like any other goal oriented organization. Fast food is linked to other aspects of society. It is, among other things, a public health concern, participant in environmental destruction, and an expanding low-wage employer providing little job security or few sustainable benefits. The formal organizational model can be used in a number of ways. Yet McDonalds has been successful in creating markets across the world. Its organization varies little from Hong Kong to Nebraska. We operate colleges, small businesses, households, and governments using the same basic pattern of social organization.
Here we look at the contemporary situation.
The features of modern organizations date back to the turn of the century with Fordism and the advent of rationalization. Efficiency is one of the main goals addressed by humans in the 20th century. The ford automobile is an application of rationalization, as were the Nazi death camps. Hitler also invented the modern highway system later used in America. German and American highways are very similar. As we can see, the use of technology and rational organization are subject to human values and moral systems. Today, we use rationalization in every aspect of our lives. This means we discipline ourselves, receive healthcare, participate in physical activity, or measure the value of almost any behavior or artifact by a logical assessment of the most efficient means to achieve a goal.
In chapter three of your text you may remember reading about the werkglocken or work clocks in Germany. The village clock keeps workers in line. We make our body adapt to the needs of time. This is a rational process. Our schedule is a constant companion.
Bureaucracies have a division of labor. They separate people by skill level. Instead of kinship we place people in modern society based on credentials. Many bureaucracies are top-down. They have a hierarchy of leadership. The power inside a firm is recognized through the use of authority. In theory, authority is constituted in the position not the person. Organizations also exhibit an informal dimension where individuals carve out a space outside of policies and rules. For instance secretaries often control more of an organization than their job description entails. Standardized procedures allow companies to control production, meet legal regulations, and produce efficiently. Rules and standardized procedures allow a company to treat everyone equally. We use the principles of organizations in our everyday life to make decisions.
III. Professionalization
Professionalization and credentialism are realities of the modern world. Expert knowledge comes from credentialism (acknowledged expertise). Advanced training gives individuals the authority to make decisions that impact millions of people. Formal organizations may exhibit undemocratic characteristics. Thus many companies are top down. Many are so large that participation would be impossible. Workers are specialized and most do not understand or are in a position to know how other workers do their jobs. Formal organizations are seen as being ruled by the few. The irony of modern democratic societies is the undemocratic reality of many social institutions and situations.
Control over workers creates what Karl Marx called alienation. Alienation is a reality for many service workers. Among other things alienation means individuals will not reach their full potential. Next we look the McDonaldization of Society thesis.
IV. McDonaldization of Society
While in theory modern society provides us with services and goods never imagined we must hold our society up to the light.
The rising service sector in American society represents a change in lifestyle and the way society is organized. The McDonaldization of society is the introduction of a new form of social organization. It is one where efficiency, calculations, quantification, predictability, and control have become the goals of social institutions (Ritzer 2000). These processes have been adapted to every aspect of our lives in the late 20th century. We are moving toward a society defined by the "means of consumption." (Ritzer 1999). That is, we are no longer engaged in production rather in consumption as a lifestyle. Providing and using information and services are important to the modern economic system.
U.S. consumer mass society began in the 1950s with popular culture. The interstate system and the suburbs were followed by new forms of shopping replacing the local community as the basis for production and consumption.
Our current consumer cultures began with McDonalds (1956); mass produced suburbs (1947); Best Western (1946); Holiday Inn (1952); national TV broadcasting (1946); Disneyland (1955); the computer (1946); and Jets (1952). The supermarket began to replace local stores in the 1950s.
Cas Walkers in Knoxville was east Tennessee's first chain grocery store. Morristown had a Kroger in the 1970s which went out due to high prices from union labor. Today, few of Morristown's supermarkets are union. The standardized supermarket in the South coexists with local foodways. Needless to say you can still find pork products at the Food Lion. Few in rural east Tennessee go to the farmers market and fewer still have access to locally produced items.
Today, the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota has 400 stores. Wal-mart has constructed thousands of metal buildings which operate as warehouses for its integrated trucking enterprises. These are the modern catherdals of consumption (Ritzer 1995; 1999). Malls, cybermalls, Disney World, and Wal-marts are part of our new lifestyle characterized by time poverty. We can no longer afford to shop daily in town for fresh produce or cook it. Fast food fits our lifestyles. Wal-mart is a small town unto itself. It saves us from going to single small shops if they exist.
We have replaced earlier forms of social organization with the idea that bigger is better (calculability). The giant size tissue paper or big gulp coke tell us that quantity is above quality in our decisions. Four slices of bacon on a monster burger detracts us from a focus on food quality. A whopper has 40 to 50 grams of fat. We can also (calculate) every aspect of human behavior. Children's test scores are the result of the same principles which provide whoppers or up-sized soft drinks.
We also have (predictability) in mass marketed food and goods throughout the world. It is simply always the same. Among other things a college student is a grade point average. Our society is changing in a number of ways. The three hour Lincoln-Douglas debate has been replaced by the 60 second political commercial sandwich in between product advertisements on television. Few of us could recite the main ideas of the last election, just that it seemed to long.
The application of the principles of the fast food industry is evident in the American way of death and our daily lives. The funeral home uses the most efficient standardized processes to sew a body up, put on make up, and present a corpse. Most funeral homes are now owned by chains using standardized procedures. Local ownership of funeral homes has declined significantly in the last 15 years.
Children's futures are measured almost entirely by standardized test score where colleges in an effort to reduce costs in the name of efficiency hire adjuncts to not have to pay full-time professors. Efficiency can create a false feeling of success. We can efficiently dispose of billions of tons of garbage every year not realizing the cost to the environment, ecology, or society. Ritzer (1999:81)describes the Disney way,
"The same efficiency is true for trash removal. Were this not the case, Disney World would quickly be swamped with debris. Crews are employed to sweep, collect, and empty trash. There is also an elaborate underground tube system into which trash is emptied and whisked away at sixty miles per hour to a central trash disposal plant far from the view of visitors... Disney world is surrealistically clean..."
We live in a world where services are our entertainment replacing the novel and the play or the dance troop. Mickey Mouse dances for us in a package deal, or a cruise provides all the services of society until the ticket runs out. Las Vegas provides gambling, prostitutes, food, wedding chapels, and lodging out of a desert in a human created artificial world.
Our newest architecture seems to be brick buildings with plastic bubbles in the form of letters spelling Wendy's, McDonalds, and so forth. We call this architecture decorated sheds. It has a square building with symbolism added (Venturi 1968). East Tennessee and Appalachia's version of Disney world is Dollywood. Sevier County is the home of signs advertising farm life, stereotypes about the region, and assorted consumer and entertainment venues.
Plastic money has become a major economic reality. Credit card debt and bankruptcy are at all time highs. Efficiency in money means immediate access such as a credit card. The worse off are college aged individuals who are less educated about credit. College students on campus can easily become 20 or 50,000 dollars in debt. Paying off debt for luxury items has become a normal experience for students who will be paying corporations up to 20 percent interest long after college is over (Ritzer 1995:13).
Other examples in our lives includes local diners replaced by fast food, day care as a standardized business or what has been termed (kennels for kids). We are watching the rise of chain hotels, restaurants, malls replacing independent retailers, and Wal-mart versus the local hardware store. We see health maintenance organizations controlling or replacing family doctors. These changes are redirecting our personal lives. We can eat in a matter of minutes after being served in a matter of seconds. Children are the population catered to at McDonalds. Adults seldom play in the giant web of plastic balls. But they do come to expect the same burger with the same additives and preservatives. (Control) is very evident is the processes of rationalization. Insurance companies control which doctor you see. Chains control the food options when you travel. Workers pushing buttons gain few job skills in fast food.
Sociologists have applied the concept to family, criminal justice, churches, credit, sex industries, and the courts (Ritzer 2002). We have introduced rationality into most areas of our lives.
The Irrational Reality The costs of a new society always has to be measured with the gains. McDonalds serves mainly nutritionally poor food, and its processes create environmental hazards in the form of garbage and wastes. Yet it provides services for time poor people. Immediate credit can be problematic where millions operate credit cards as a form of solvent money. What happens when we lose local culture to generic ones? Home cooking may be very time consuming. Fixing your own car is also. Taking care of children is impossible for dual-earner households.
Coke is the largest selling beverage in world. It has no nutritional value in a world where millions starve to death daily in underdeveloped countries and countless others suffer from a lack of nutrition in developed countries.
Fast food sales have gone from six billion to 110 billion in the last 30 years. It hires one million people and is second only to seasonal farm jobs for low wages. McDonalds is the largest retail owner of property in the U.S. Critics of the industry point to the targeting of children as a main source of sales. With the decline in public playgrounds due to privatization McDonalds 8,000 playgrounds allow fast food to merge with child care and quality time stolen from time poverty (Schlosser 2002). In the U.S. one-half of adults and one out of three children are overweight. There are for the time more overweight people than hungry people in the world. Some countries have large weight gaps in their populations. They The American Medical Association estimates that 300,000 Americans die each year from obesity related illnesses.
For others in the U.S. time poverty reflects the fact many Americans work more than 40 hours a week often to pay for luxury goods. Time spent with family and community has decreased substantially. In looking at the emerging American workload Robert Reich tells us that the average American works two weeks longer a year than did twenty years ago. The average married couple works seven weeks longer than ten years ago. The average American works 350 hours more a year than the average European (Reich 2001).
Time poverty means fast food, less contact between children responsible adults, more time commuting, and less time away from work. Modern efficiency is part of emerging lifestyles.
To sum up: We have moved to a type of society based on consumption and the application of rationality to all aspects of our lives. Using the sociological imagination we see that the efficiency of the modern world goes hand and hand with changes which may not always be desirable. We have more consumer goods than in the past.
Questions:
1) What is your perspective on the McDonaldization thesis? Define it. (That the principles of McDonalds are being applied to other aspects of society) Is it good or bad? How does your lifestyle reflect or not reflect time poverty?
2) Is it right to suggest that the negative aspects of McDonalds (obesity, waste, labor dehumanization, and destruction of culture) should be contained?
3) Can we limit Wal-Mart's impact on small shops as they have in northern states? Your thoughts? Should we?
Works Cited
Craig, Nils. 1997. Alternative World. (Housemans Bookshop).
Reich, Robert. 2001. The Future of Success. (Alfred Knopf, New York).
Ritzer, George. 1995. Expression America; A Critique of the Global Credit Card Society. (Pine Forge Press).
Ritzer, George. 1999. Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Revolutionizing the means of Consumption. (Pine Forge Press).
Ritzer, George. 2000. The McDonaldization of Society. (Pine Forge Press. New Century Edition).
Ritzer, George. 2002. McDonaldization: The Reader. Sage.
Schlosser, Eric. 2001. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All American Meal. Houghton: Mifflin Boston.
Venturi, Robert. 1968. Learning From Los Vegas.
Sites
McDonaldization
http://www.umsl.edu/~rkeel/010/mcdonsoc.html McDonaldization of Society
http://www.mcdonaldization.com/ourstore.shtml Books on McDonaldization
http://humanities.sw.vccs.edu:16080/SOC/notes/chapter7/tsld006.htm Aspects of McDonaldization
http://www.boomchild.com/tim/george.html George Ritzer Interview
Post Modern Building Styles
http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/~pventura/architainment.html Decorated Sheds
http://people.uncw.edu/schmidt/PoMoImages/Architecture/VenturiBook.htm
http://www.dollywood.com/ The Dollywood Web Site