McGregor Commission Report on the Press (UK), 1977A B C D E F G H IJKL M N O P R S T U VXYZWcare, travel, leisure, dieting, politics, the family,
and virtually every other aspect of society’.
Ritzer sees McDonaldization as showing every
sign ‘of being an inexorable process by sweeping
through seemingly impervious institutions and
parts of the world’. McDonalds is America, and
wherever the Big Mac and fries are consumed, so
is the American way of life, the American dream.
The author analyses his subject through the
frame of ideas posed by the German social theo-
rist, Max Weber (1864–1920), on the workings
of bureaucracy in the creation of an ‘iron cage’
of rationality, that is a bureaucratic sameness of
normative behaviour from which it is impossible
to escape.
In Ritzer’s view, the universalization, the
rationalization of eating and other behaviours,
as represented and driven by the McDonald’s
empire, is based upon four ‘alluring dimensions’
of irresistibility: effi ciency (‘the optimum method
for getting from one point to another’); calcu-
lability (‘quantity has become the equivalent to
quality’); predictability (‘there is great comfort in
knowing that McDonald’s off ers no surprises’);
and control, a production/service discipline
which applies equally to the customer as to those
who serve them.
Crucial in the exercise of control is the use of
technology, ‘the soft-drink dispenser that shuts
itself off when the glass is full, the french fries
machine that rings and lifts itself out of the oil
when the fries are crisp’. Th is technology, says
Ritzer, ‘increases the corporation’s control over
workers’.
Ritzer acknowledges that McDonaldization
has ‘powerful advantages’, but he argues that the
foundations of its success as mentioned above
‘can be thought of as the basic components of a
rational system’; his view is that ‘rational systems
inevitably spawn irrationalities’ and ‘irrational
consequences’, not the least of them being
matters of ecological concern. Ritzer’s book
focuses on the ‘great costs and enormous risks of
McDonaldization’; its purpose is to help alert the
public to these and ‘to stem its tide’ while fearing
that ‘the future will bring with it more rather
than less McDonaldization’. See slapps. See also
topic guide under global perspectives.
▶Barry Smart, ed., Resisting McDonaldization (Sage,
1999).
McGregor Commission Report on the Press
(UK), 1977 Under the chairmanship of Profes-
sor Oliver Ross Gregor, the Royal Commission
produced an interim report in 1976. Concerned
about the shaky finances of newspapers, the
Commission proposed that the State should giveis an important distinction between the notion
of setting personal agendas by communication
directly to the public and setting an institutional
agenda by infl uencing the politicians and deci-
sion makers.’ McQuail and Windähl perceive
here a dual role for the media – influencing
public opinion, and infl uencing the elite: ‘In
reality there is a continuous interaction between
elite proposals and public views, with the media
acting as carrier as well as source.’
A third criticism of McCombs and Shaw’s
model relates to the actual intentions of the
media: do they initiate and select the issues which
they go on to amplify; climb aboard a ‘band-
wagon’ of nascent public interest; or respond
chiefly to the promptings of the power elite?
Further, it was early in the day for McCombs and
Shaw to key into the shifts in public attention
and activity brought about by the internet
and the online opportunities it has provided for
greater participation and interactivity.
For a diagrammatic representation of the
model, see James Watson’s Media Communica-
tion: An Introduction to Theory and Process
(Palgrave Macmillan,3rd edition, 2008), Chapter
5, ‘Th e news: gates, agendas and values’, page 151.
See blogosphere; consent, manufacture
of; guard dog metaphor; intervening
variables (ivs); mainstreaming; mean
world syndrome; mobilization; noelle-
neumann’s spiral of silence model of
public opinion, 1974; one-step, two-step,
multi-step flow models of communica-
tion; rogers and dearing’s agenda-
setting model, 1987; significant others.
See also topic guide under communication
models.
▶McCombs and Shaw, ‘The evolution of agenda
setting research: twenty-fi ve years in the marketplace
of ideas’, Journal of Communication Spring, 1993;
James W. Dearing and Everett M. Rogers, Agenda-
Setting (Sage, 1996).
McDonaldization Term formulated, and
introduced in his book Th e McDonaldization of
Society (Pine Forge Press, 1992, revised edition,
1996), by George Ritzer, and with the subtitle
‘An investigation into the changing character of
contemporary social life’. As Ritzer points out,
the book is not about the fast-food business, but
rather serves as a major paradigm of a ‘wide-
ranging process I call McDonaldization’ – the
‘process by which the principles of the fast-food
restaurants are coming to dominate more and
more sectors of American society as well as
of the rest of the world’; these eff ects are felt
throughout culture, in ‘education, work, health