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George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society: 20th Anniversary Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2013, 237 pp., $46.00 paper (978-1-4522-2669-9).
Over the past few decades, George Ritzer's work on McDonaldization has effectively become a franchise operation in its own right. Since his initial formulation of the term in a short article in the Journal of American Culture in 1983, the so-called "McDonaldization thesis" has spawned a score of related books and academic articles by Ritzer and others, generated an extensive secondary literature, become a pedagogical staple in countless university courses, and established itself as part of the popular lexicon in ways that few sociological concepts ever have. The recent publication of a special 20th anniversary edition of Ritzer's The McDonaldization of Society presents us with an opportunity to reflect appreciatively but critically upon this impressive legacy, and to assess how well Ritzer's long-established theoretical framework has been able to adapt to or withstand the shifting winds of intellectual and historical change.
Although this seventh edition of Ritzer's classic text has updated its range of topical references and ventured to address a range of new issues, it is also - somewhat counter-intuitively - notably shorter and more concisely argued than the previous edition. Ritzer's decision to condense and combine previously separate chapters and to significantly pare back his analysis of topics such as globalization threatens to amplify the book's preexisting tendency toward intellectual simplification and over-generalization, but it arguably enhances the book's already considerable appeal as an undergraduate teaching text. While his fellow professional scholars might understandably wish that Ritzer had afforded himself the space to reformulate and defend the McDonaldization thesis with greater nuance, precision, and responsiveness...