The author is a proud sponsor of the 2020 SAGE Keith Roberts Teaching Innovations Award―enabling graduate students and early career faculty to attend the annual ASA pre-conference teaching and learning workshop.
The book that made "McDonaldization" part of the lexicon of contemporary sociological theory, read by hundreds of thousands of students, is now in its Ninth Edition!
George Ritzer′s seminal work of critical sociology, The McDonaldization of Society, continues to stand as one of the pillars of modern day sociological thought. Building on the argument that the fast food restaurant has become the model for the rationalization process today, this book links theory to contemporary life in a globalized world and resonates with students in a way that few other books do. Ritzer opens students’ eyes to many current issues and shows how McDonaldization’s principles apply to other settings, especially in the areas of consumption and globalization. This new edition has been significantly reoriented to reflect our experience of McDonaldization in the world of online consumption.
New to this Edition
- Examines how retailers like Amazon represent a new era of "datafication," the transformation of vast amounts of information into quantifiable data.
- Discusses how the digital world has almost unlimited potential to turn consumers into "prosumers" doing volunteer work formerly done by paid employees.
- This edition is more streamlined than previous editions to sharpen its argument and message, and make it more useable as a secondary reading in a wide range of courses
George Ritzer is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, where he has also been a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and won a Teaching Excellence Award. He was awarded the Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award by the American Sociological Association, an honorary doctorate from LaTrobe University in Australia, and the Robin Williams Lectureship from the Eastern Sociological Society. His best-known work, The McDonaldization of Society (8th ed.), has been read by hundreds of thousands of students over two decades and translated into over a dozen languages. Ritzer is also the editor of McDonaldization: The Reader; and author of other works of critical sociology related to the McDonaldization thesis, including Enchanting a Disenchanted World, The Globalization of Nothing, Expressing America: A Critique of the Global Credit Card Society, as well as a series best-selling social theory textbooks and Globalization: A Basic Text. He is the Editor of the Encyclopedia of Social Theory (2 vols.), the Encyclopedia of Sociology (11 vols.; 2nd edition forthcoming), the Encyclopedia of Globalization (5 vols.), and is Founding Editor of the Journal of Consumer Culture. In 2016 he will publish the second edition of Essentials of Sociology with SAGE.
