George Ritzer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
George Ritzer (born January 2, 1940) is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. A largely self-taught sociologist, Ritzer is most widely known in the scholarly community for his distinctive contributions to the study of consumption, globalization, metatheory, and modern and postmodern social theory generally. Ritzer is an academic celebrity, however, as a result of The McDonaldization of Society (4th edition 2004; first published in 1993), which is among the most popular monographs ever penned by a sociologist. A pessimist in the Weberian tradition, Ritzer has expanded and developed his highly critical analysis of contemporary social life in such monographs as the aptly titled The Globalization of Nothing (2004; second edition forthcoming in 2007).
Contents |
[edit] Early Life and Career
Ritzer was born and raised in New York City. The eldest of two boys, his was a self-described “upper lower class” Jewish family supported by his father’s work as a taxi cab driver and his mother’s as a secretary. Ritzer graduated from the highly selective Bronx High School of Science (1958) and received a B.A. in psychology from City College of New York (1962). Pursuing an idiosyncratic path, Ritzer then earned an M.B.A. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1964) and worked in personnel management for the Ford Motor Company before earning a doctorate in organizational behavior from the School of Labor and Industrial Relations at Cornell University (1968).
That he never pursued a degree in sociology notwithstanding, Ritzer’s early academic career was remarkably accelerated. Having served as Assistant Professor of Sociology at Tulane University (1968-1970) and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas (1970-1974), Ritzer was appointed Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland in 1974, less than seven years after receiving his doctorate.
[edit] Main Publications
Ritzer is prolific. He has published 12 monographs and 7 textbooks, many of the latter, especially, in numerous multiple editions. He has also edited 11 various professional volumes, 3 encyclopedias (including the massive Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology forthcoming in 2006), and authored roughly 100 scholarly articles in referred journals. Review of Ritzer’s record of publication is therefore profitably divided by topic and type.
[edit] McDonaldization.
Ritzer’s “McDonaldization thesis,” so called, is an extension of Max Weber’s (1864-1920) classical theory of the rationalization of modern society and culture. Where Weber famously used the terminology of a “steel-hard cage” to describe the stultifying, Kafkaesque effects of bureaucratized life, Ritzer argues that the McDonald’s® restaurant has become the better exemplar of current forms of instrumental rationality and its ultimately irrational and harmful human consequences. Beyond the original book-length development of this argument referenced above, the most important works and related commentaries on McDonaldization are Ritzer’s own edited McDonalization: The Reader (2nd edition, 2006) and The McDonaldization Thesis: Extensions and Explorations (1998), as well as Alfino, Caputo, and Wynyard’s edited McDonalization Revisited (1998) and Smart’s edited Resisting McDonaldization (1999).
[edit] Consumption.
An early admirer of Jean Baudrillard’s Consumer Society (1970), Ritzer is a leading proponent of the study of consumption. Consumption is understood as systemic and pervasive and quite often the source of the most perverse features of contemporary social life, particularly as experienced in the world’s dominant postindustrial societies. In addition to The McDonaldization of Society, the most important sources for Ritzer’s sociology of consumption are his edited Explorations in the Sociology of Consumption: Fast Food Restaurants, Credit Cards and Casinos (2001), Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Revolutionizing the Means of Consumption (2nd edition, 2005), and Expressing America: A Critique of the Global Credit-Card Society (1995). Ritzer is also editor of Sage’s Journal of Consumer Culture, which he co-founded with Don Slater.
[edit] Globalization.
Generally referring to the rapidly increasing world-wide integration and interdependence of societies and cultures, Ritzer’s aforementioned The Globalization of Nothing (2004) stakes out a provocative perspective in the on-going and voluminous globalization discourse. For Ritzer, globalization typically leads to “loss amidst monumental abundance,” where consumption of vast quantities of serial social forms that have been centrally conceived and controlled –one McDonald’s® hamburger, i.e., one instance of nothing again and again—dominates social life. In addition to the forthcoming second edition of The Globalization of Nothing (2007), see especially a special review symposium in the Sage journal Thesis Eleven (Number 76, February 2004).
[edit] Metatheory.
Influenced by Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Ritzer has long advocated for the view that social theory is improved by systematic, comparative and reflexive attention to implicit conceptual structures and oft-hidden assumptions. Infused with an integrating impulse that never, however, tips over into grand theory, Ritzer’s metatheorizing depicts and analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of a variety of major and less common paradigmatic approaches to the conceptualization of society and culture. Key works include Sociology: A Multiple Paradigm Science (1975), Toward an Integrated Sociological Paradigm (1981), Metatheorizing in Sociology (1991), and Explorations in Social Theory: From Metatheorizing to Rationalization (2001). See also Ritzer’s edited Metatheorizing (1992).
[edit] Modern and Postmodern Social Theory.
Ritzer is known to generations of students as the author of numerous highly accessible, comprehensive introductions and compendia in social theory. As with several of Ritzer’s other principal works, many are translated into languages as diverse as Chinese, Russian, Persian, Hebrew and Portuguese. Key volumes in this genre include the Encyclopedia of Social Theory (2004), Postmodern Social Theory (1997), Sociological Theory (2004, 6th edition), Classical Sociological Theory (2004, 4th edition), and Modern Sociological Theory (2004, 6th edition). For Ritzer’s substantive contributions to modern and postmodern social theorizing, see again Explorations in Social Theory: From Metatheorizing to Rationalization (2001).
[edit] Criticism.
Ritzer’s strengths as an original, accessible, and popular author have occasionally led his harshest critics to charge him with pandering to mass audiences by unreasonably reducing the complexity of the subjects that he addresses in order, presumably, to achieve record book sales. At a deeper level, Ritzer has also been accused of being too easily entwined with the very processes that he manifestly subjects to critical analysis, such that instead of Weber there is produced McWeber, so that Ritzer’s entertainingly cheeky analysis of globalization becomes much ado about nothing. Ritzer is also criticized by the Marxian left for failing to fully appreciate and embrace Marxian theories of alienation, reification, and the culture industry, that is, for failing to identify capitalism as the principal cause of “McDonaldization” and the growing worldwide preponderance of “nothing.” Ritzer has often responded to these and other criticisms. Key texts include the aforementioned Resisting McDonaldization (1999) and the review symposium in Thesis Eleven (February 2004).
[edit] Future Work.
A writer at heart, Ritzer shows no signs of reducing his publication output. As noted, Ritzer has written a substantially revised and expanded edition of The Globalization of Nothing (expected in 2007) and is the editor of the forthcoming Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, which numbers 11 volumes and is expected in December, 2006. Ritzer’s most current project is original theorizing on the significance of outsourcing.
