And Its Precursors

From the Iron Cage to the Fast-

food Factory

Xiaolian and Sheena

Bureaucratization and
Rationalization: Into the Iron
Cage
• Bureaucracy, a formally rationalized
structure
• Emerging iron cage of rationality
• Its advantages for speed, efficiency and
mechanisms for discovering and
implementing optimum means to ends
• Irrationalities of formally rationalized
systems eg: dehumanizing, quantify and
control
Scientific Management
• Designed to make work more efficient
which is the time and motion studies
• Nonhuman technology which exerted great
control over workers
• Workers required to do one or few things
where most skills and abilities were not
used
• Brought together with the principles of
bureaucracy and assembly line to the
creation of McDonaldization
The Assembly Line: Producing
Robot-like Workers
• Ideas of scientific management shape it to
suit automobile industry
• An efficient system for manufacturing
automobile that is predictable,
quantification and maximum control
• Replace by robots for the simplified tasks
• The use of conveyor belt
• The introduction of chains
Levittown: “Houses Go Up
Boom, Boom, Boom”
• Highly rationalized, produced in mass
• Rationalize work of construction laborer
similar to automobile worker
• “The same man does the same thing
everyday”
• Constructions are rigidly defined & of
rationalized steps
• Consumer getting the most house for
the least money
Shopping Centers: “The
Malling of America”
• Another aspect of rationalized society
• 37,000 malls in US, 175 million shoppers
per month
• Exhibit basic characteristics of
McDonaldization
• Shopping malls & McDonaldized chains
complement one another beautifully
Ray Kroc and the McDonald
Brothers: Creating the “Fast-
food Factory”
• First opened in 1937 by Mac and Dick
McDonald
• Based on quantifiable principles of speed,
volume and low price
• Job fragmentation / Specialization
• Ray Kroc build the McDonald’s empire of
franchising
 Uniformity
 Maximized central control
 Profits
 Encourage innovations
 Rational principles
Conclusion
• McDonald’s & process of McDonalization
did not occur in a historical vacuum
• Contributed structural bases needed for
fast-food chain to thrive
• McDonalization is a logical extension of
the idea of rationalization and a label to
describe the most contemporary aspects
of this process.