McJobs and Pieces of Flair

Abstract

This article offers strategies for teaching about rationality, bureaucracy, and social change using George Ritzer’s The McDonaldization of Society and its ideas about efficiency, predictability, calculability, and control. Student learning is facilitated using a series of strategies: making the familiar strange, explaining McDonaldization, self-investigation and discovery, and exploring and implementing alternatives. Through assignments, class exercises, and films, students contextualize modernity and its unintended negative consequences by viewing McDonaldization though the lenses of work and jobs. These strategies provide a framework to help students understand key concepts, critique McDonaldization, and formulate positive ways to cope with Weber’s iron cage.