And if you want these kinds of dreams
It’s Californication
…
It’s understood that
Sells Californication
…
And tidal waves couldn’t save the world
From Californication
…
But this is what you’re craving.
Dream of Californication
The above are selected segments from the Red Hot Chili Peppers song “Californication,” part of an album of the same name released in 1999. They serve as a good introduction to the topic of this paper. As used by the globally acclaimed band, Californication refers to a process of the spread of American culture and values by
In the song, the process of Californication seems dangerous and quite inevitable. The “dreams” so widely “craved” are those made possible by materialism – the feelings of happiness, accomplishment, and high social status that seem to result from owning expensive and lucrative products. These consumer “dreams” are actively being “sold” by Hollywood and the mass media on a global scale, and, in effect, no force can “save the world” from the spread of Californication. The process is made inevitable by a sort of brainwashing of the mass public; those affected by Californication seem to “crave” it more and more.
The larger phenomenon associated with Californication, often referred to as Americanization or Westernization by its critics, has deeper societal meanings when viewed in sociologist George Ritzer’s perspective. Ritzer also sees his form of Californication as inevitable and dangerous, but his reasons for this go deep into social theory which is more comprehensive in its scope. Ritzer argues that a trend of rationalization is spreading not only globally, but into many aspects of society, undoubtedly aided by the popularity of American culture as portrayed in the mass media; he coins this trend “McDonaldization.” Consumerism as exemplified in Californication and Ritzer’s theory of McDonaldization are directly linked and often complement each other; the society as a whole is being taken over by the McDonaldization process and, in effect, a largely American lifestyle.
The point of this paper is not to criticize American culture and values, or to negatively portray any part thereof solely because it is American in nature. The fact that the
The theory of McDonaldization gets its name from the McDonald’s fast food restaurant chain. Ritzer realized that the way in which McDonald’s operates serves as the perfect model for the contemporary rationalization process that he terms McDonaldization. The widespread global success of McDonald’s makes it a symbol in its own right; Ronald McDonald and the golden arches are the most recognizable symbols in the world, more so than Coca-Cola and in some cases even the Christian cross. The success of McDonald’s can be explained by the revolutionary way in which it operates its thousands of restaurants, from the production to the consumption sectors, and this is by the rationalization process. Ritzer concludes, “In short, McDonald’s has succeeded because it offers consumers, workers, and managers efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control” (Ritzer, Society 12).
In this paper I plan to take a socio-historical approach to expand of Ritzer’s thesis and to further explain and illustrate the possible negative consequences of McDonaldization on American, and eventually global, future society. The historical aspect of my argument will be a comparison of the effects of McDonaldization on current and future society to that of the Middle Age period in western civilization; there is a striking resemblance and many parallels can be drawn between the two that will help illustrate the rather abstract theory of McDonaldization. In doing this, I plan on making Ritzer’s argument easier to understand and its implications on society clearer. Mowshowitz, in his discussion of “virtual organization,” uses references to the Middle Ages frequently to explain his theory, but he does not make the sociological link to McDonaldization that “virtual organization” implies. I plan on making this link by incorporating Mowshowitz into Ritzer, and thus making a stronger, more comprehensive argument. In fact, it may be possible to coin a new term for Ritzer’s McDonaldization phenomenon, one that is more concrete and takes into consideration its socio-historical similarity to medieval society – McFeudalization.
Before any such parallels between the supposed future society and the Middle Ages can be drawn, an introduction to the consumer society must be presented. Consumerism is the underlying force that pushes McDonaldization and “virtual organization” forward and thus brief discussions of its history and the contemporary trends within it are needed. The
Over the past couple decades the American economy experienced a dramatic shift that changed the image and nature of its workforce. The rapid trend from the industrial production jobs to the service-oriented economy created millions of new jobs while eliminating others. Many expected the new service economy to result in an expansion of high-tech, high-paying jobs, but the reality is that while numerous new jobs were created, most of them were low-paying and low-skilled. The gradual elimination of the more stable industrial sector coupled with the creation of these “McJobs,” as Ritzer calls those jobs that require little or no skills, is seen by many experts as a “downward mobility” in the labor force as a whole (Luxenberg 31). Workers that are laid off in the production sector can expect a lower standard of living when transitioning into the expanding service sector, because while most workers fall in the middle of the earnings spectrum in a traditional factory, most jobs in the service industry are very low-paying (Luxenberg 31). Talwar speaks of those being laid off as the “…men who a generation earlier would be doing semiskilled manual work at a factory. They are finding little or no place in today’s service economy – no place, that is, that provides a decent standard of living for a family, with job security, a good income, and health insurance” (Talwar 180). Roberts explains this trend as the end of the “mass era” that followed World War II, in which “increased output of mass production resulted in low manufacturing costs…[and] unskilled workers joined the ranks of the middle class because their wages were artificially propped up…by the power of unions and the increasing demand for mass-produced goods” (Roberts 4). Roberts further explains the contemporary trend:
Today, technology and globalization of the market place are the drivers of the new economy. Global competition has forced both private and public sectors to shed their inefficiencies that had been building up since the Second World War. The wages of low and unskilled workers are being forced down in industrialized countries because labour-intensive manufacturing is moving to low-wage, developing countries. (Roberts 4-5)
The unfortunate consequences of the new service economy on the labor process are part of a larger phenomenon that’s marked by the shift of the “means of production” in the consumer society to the “means of consumption.” The heavily rationalized mass-production of goods is giving way to an also rationalized mass-consumption of goods and, increasingly, services. The rise of the service industry is a clear example of this; the increased importance on the satisfaction of the consumer opened up a new industry that deals with providing goods and services demanded by consumers and getting other consumers to want to buy these new goods and services. Ritzer provides a clear distinction:
Capitalism has undergone a shift in focus from production to consumption. In the early days of their economic system, capitalists concentrated almost exclusively on controlling production in general, and production workers in particular. As factories have moved out of advanced capitalist nations, those nations have moved toward controlling consumption in general, especially the thoughts and actions of consumers. While producing more and cheaper goods remains important, attention is increasingly being devoted to getting people to consumer more, and a greater variety of, things. (Ritzer, Thesis 118)
By delivering McDonaldized goods and services to increasingly demanding consumers, producers in the consumer society exert a kind of control through subliminal loyalty over consumers. This control through loyalty takes the form of advertising and branding, both of which rely on the tenets of McDonaldization to get into the consumer psyche in order to get them to buy the advertised brands. In this way, the control is psychological in nature and is nothing more than a more extreme version of Californication as discussed in the introduction; that is, consumers crave the feelings that are promised them as a result of the consumption of the advertised goods and services. The increased emphasis on the “means of consumption,” then, is the propagation of materialism. The new consumer, sensitive to the emotional and adaptive characters of advertised goods and services, is in the process of consuming “simulacra,” or simulations, of these characters rather than of their reality (Ritzer, Thesis 121). What this means is that every good and service is, in effect, a copy of some original product, whether it be concrete or abstract, and through branding and advertising, companies bestow a favorable personality to this original product that is simulated in the mass-production and mass-consumption of the multitude of copies that are being provided to consumers. Goods and services being linked to a value system of the consumer cannot be explained in strictly economic terms, as explained by Miller:
The broader nature of consumption is better considered within an ethnography of society rather than an ethnography of business, because it is mainly related to the objectification of values. The ability to make purchases as an economic function gives little guidance as to the extraordinarily complex, contradictory and nuanced background to actual consumption, which is the selection of particular strategies of prioritization and taste. (Miller 310)
Why is the consumer society moving in the direction of post-modernism? Capitalism was in trouble in the early 1980s as demand for the mass-produced low-quality goods decreased, and thus a new service economy emerged as described earlier. As mentioned before by Roberts, the inefficiencies of national manufacturing firms caused them to seek new sources of capital overseas in order to cut costs. The communication revolution, which saw innovation in digitalization and networking, made this global organization possible and thus efficient multinationals were born. All of these changes, facilitated in no small part by the Neo-liberalist governmental policies started in the late 1980s in which privatization of inefficient state-controlled industries was the order of the day, led to a revival of the free market economy. The emphasis on consumption is nothing more than a post-modern extension of capitalism, as explained bluntly by Ritzer: “The fact is that capitalists need customers to spend more than they should, and often more than they can afford, on consumption in order to keep the economy operating at a high and ever-increasing level… Without ever-increasing consumerism, capitalism would collapse” (Ritzer, Thesis 120-1). This trend towards post-modernism is highly dependent on technological innovation, especially in the communication sector, and gives way to what Dan Schiller calls “digital capitalism.”
Following the tenets of McDonaldization, a maximization of the efficiency, calculability and predictability through increased control by non-human technologies is needed to fully support the future consumer society. The privatization and globalization of companies was the beginning of the growth and expansion of multinational corporations that were and are able to withstand and, in fact, succeed in a highly competitive, global economy. “The multinational capitalistic system is a key element of the postmodern world. It can be seen as lying at the base of the development and expansion of all the new means of consumption” (Ritzer, Thesis 127). Technological innovation in computer networks and the growth of the Internet made these corporations feasible on a global scale: “Across their breadth and depth, computer networks link with existing capitalism to massively broaden the effective reach of the marketplace. Indeed, the Internet comprises nothing less than the central production and control apparatus of an increasingly supranational market system” (Schiller xiv). Furthermore, Schiller gives evidence of the recent success of multinationals by stating that “between 1973 and 1993, transnational corporations (TNCs) from the developed countries grew in number from 7,000 to 26,000; at the later date, the world’s 100 largest nonbanking TNCs held no less than $1.4 trillion worth of foreign assets” (Schiller 37-8). By using the “digital capitalism” model and the technologies that it requires to effectively control all aspects of its operation, multinationals have thus dominated the new service economy, as explained by Dr. Mowshowitz:
Advances in transportation, communication, and computing technologies have made it possible to manage complex enterprises efficiently and effectively. With these technologies the process of making a product or providing a service can be differentiated, and the component tasks distributed to different places and executed at different times – with complete assurance that the whole process can be integrated and controlled effectively. (Mowshowitz 27)
Virtual organization, in its broadest definition, is the scientific management of an organization through the use of complex computer algorithms that calculate the most efficient way to achieve a goal, given a set of values. These values include the means of production, capital, costs of any steps in the process, various probabilities of unanticipated events, etc., and, of course, the goal, which is usually a finished product or service. Virtual organization then automatically reorganizes a corporation to use its solution to the given problem, to be implemented by local managers and crew. In many ways, virtual organization works by extreme rationalization of a corporation’s many responsibilities: “Like division of labor, virtual organization can increase efficiency, lower production costs, and improve the coordination and control of functions. Because managers generally deem these effects desirable, the theory provides a basis for projecting economic and social changes in the future” (Mowshowitz 26-7). In fact, it is easy to see the similarity between the tenets of virtual organization and those of McDonaldization, albeit the more focused emphasis of virtual organization on economic efficiency. It can be said, then, that virtual organization is McDonaldization taken to the extreme to facilitate the growth of the post-modern consumer society, which is, as we will see, itself inherently heavily McDonaldized.
What will future society look like considering the overarching effect of McDonaldization on the expansion of post-modernistic global consumer culture that is supplied by the multinational corporations operated by virtual organization? As stated before in the introduction, my goal in this paper is to present the future society as a comparison to the classical feudal society. How do the trends just discussed relate to the historical Middle Ages, and how can the feudal society of old help create an image of the possible future? We can start answering this question by defining the process of McFeudalization for which I’m making the following argument: the elimination of the middle class through further rationalization of the human behavior and thought processes lead to the dehumanization of society, in which the majority becomes subjected to the political, economic, and psychological dominance of a relatively small number of professionals who rule through consumerism in the post-modernistic era, aided by the intangibility of the virtual organization of the fundamental systems of society, including government, economy, education, etc. McFeudalization is thus a very comprehensive process that encompasses society and the world as a whole using a combination of all of the trends discussed earlier in the paper; in fact, it inherently brings up a notion of a new world order, one that is quite different from our own. The link to classical feudal society is still not clear, however, and further analysis of McFeudalization is needed.
Historical feudal society came at the heels of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, just after a series of invasions into
…for the greater part of the Middle Ages ideas relating to the public sphere were shaped by Roman concepts and notions and partly by Christian doctrines. The concepts of Roman parentage which are directly relevant are those concerned with the structure of society as a corporation. This corporational element seems a crucial and vital feature of medieval society and has profound relevance…for in combination with the ecclesiological strain of thought it led without great effort to the thesis that the Christian was a member of the all-embracing, comprehensive corporation, the Church. (Ullman 7)
It is common knowledge that historical feudal society was a two-class system comprised of the privileged nobility and the inferior peasantry. The nobility were the masters of the political as well as economic systems of feudal society. Peasants were bound to them through feudal contracts, and, even though the peasants led fairly autonomous private lives, they were nonetheless bound to a lifetime of servitude during which they were restricted of social mobility. A similar pattern of a two-class social hierarchy is emerging in contemporary American society.
As discussed in the new service economy’s impact on the labor process, McDonaldization is also affecting the work world by rationalizing jobs that used to require certain skills to perform, even those considered to be middle-level jobs. The McDonaldization process that Ritzer describes is further explained by Schlosser:
The strict regimentation…creates standardized products… And it gives…companies an enormous amount of power over their employees…The management no longer depends upon the talents or skills of its workers… Jobs that have been “de-skilled” can be filled cheaply. The need to retain any individual worker is greatly reduced by the ease with which he or she can be replaced. (Schlosser 70)
The immobility of the new service industry stems from the exploitation of employees by the employing companies. Luxenberg sees this as a social danger: “The growing importance of service businesses threatens the American ideal of an egalitarian society. Over the last two decades the differences in income have been increasing” (Luxenberg 31). Schlosser gives evidence of exploitation by stating that “while the real value of the wages paid to restaurant workers has declined for the past three decades, the earnings of restaurant company executives have risen considerably” (Schlosser 73). Many experts agree that the vast majority of the employees working in the entry-level service jobs, especially those in the fast food industry, are part-time workers, many of which are considered to be the most disadvantaged members of society, including minorities and women, usually in their teens. Luxenberg explains the exploitation of workers in the fast food industry:
The [fast food] chains are fully aware of the discontent of workers. By keeping hours and wages unappealing the companies ensure that employees will leave before they become entitled to raises or benefits. High turnover also makes it difficult for unions to organize workers. (Luxenberg 35)
The level of exploitation seen in the new service industry seems to be fueling the social immobilization of the lower-level workforce. By nature, McJobs offer no real advantages to its employees, most of whom are willing to advance up the social ladder but are constrained from doing so. Ritzer further explains the impacts of the McDonaldization process on advancement opportunities:
The skills acquired in McJobs are not likely to prepare one for, help one to acquire, or help one to function well in, the far more desirable post-industrial occupations which are highly complex and require high levels of skill and education. Experience in routinized actions and scripted interactions do not help much when occupations require thought and creativity. (Ritzer, Thesis 56)
The new service economy not only increased the gap between the rich and poor, it increased the gap between those with the opportunity to advance up the social ladder and those without. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of McDonaldization on the labor process is its self-replicating nature. Ritzer explains this fully from a sociological standpoint:
The basic ideas associated with McDonaldization are part of the value system: many workers and customers have internalized them and conform to them of their own accord. Through their actions both workers and customers can be seen as actively ‘manufacturing’ or ‘subjectifying’ McDonaldization. (Ritzer, Thesis 61)
McFeudalization thus calls for a new two-tiered social order of a relatively small number of professionals as heads of multinational corporations and the majority of the population as the virtual peasants, who serve to upkeep the corporations in dehumanizing work environments. Can something like this really come about? Only with a disintegration of contemporary governments can multinational companies take over in the political sector much like they are currently dominating the economic sector. Doing so would also shift the social responsibilities of governments to the private companies. In any case, a scenario of public power in private hands is evident here, and a truly feudal society in which all aspects have a hierarchy much akin to McDonaldized systems comes about as a result. Mowshowitz, as an extension to his theory of virtual organization, also argues for the eventual take-over of corporations utilizing this system in a new world order that he terms “virtual feudalism.”
Most importantly, however, Mowshowitz and Schiller give real-world evidence of a crumbling national government. “By reducing the proportion of national income allocated to the public sector and thus compensating for reduced taxes on business, governments hope to encourage economic expansion and stimulate the creation of jobs. Individual businesses benefit from this government largesse, but the general public may not” (Mowshowitz online). Schiller also gives witness to the recent disinvestment in social services by government: “Policymakers the world over simultaneously abandoned public-service policies for market-driven tenets and acceded to the integration of networks on a transnational scale. Nationalist welfarist controls over critical infrastructure dropped away, while disparities in access widened” (Schiller 2). Furthermore, Schiller indicates:
Capital’s stewardship of the Net, taking the form of multilateral support for cyberspace as a stateless jurisdiction, works to ensure that the market development process will only deepen and broaden its incursions on national sovereignty. This process of market development via networks bears down on both existing services and, by way of an even more radical economic transformation, also on activities long sheltered from any direct profit-and-loss calculus. (Schiller 88)
A couple of thousand giant companies – as employers of workers laboring on networked production chains, as advertisers and, increasingly, as educators – today preside, not only over the economy but also over a larger web of institutions involved in social reproduction: business, of course, but also formal education, politics, and culture. (Schiller 205)
So, despite an expanding economy, daily technological breakthroughs, and creation of fabulous wealth for a few, it appears that most people are working harder than their parents to support a comparable standard of living, enjoying less security at home and on the street. Government and public officials are eyed with disdain and often hostility. Coupled with a shift in power to private organizations, these conditions set the stage for the emergence of a new order, virtual feudalism. (Mowshowitz 12)
The on-set of virtual feudalism in the world will be a gradual process of governments weakening and multinationals being made more and more powerful.
Mowshowitz’s new world order is called “virtual feudalism” because of the fact that most power will lay in private hands: “In the now emerging variant of feudalism, authority is vested in private corporations rather then individuals. Corporations preside over a domain consisting of varied resources – plant, equipment, land, and people – which may be located anywhere [in the world]” (Mowshowitz 14). Private companies will rule on a global scale, utilizing virtual organization to streamline economic and, increasingly, political processes that will no longer be able to be done effectively by the national governments. Also, as brought up earlier by Ullman, medieval society can be considered as a corporation, in that every member of this society owed allegiance to a lord who then ruled absolutely in the supposed “interest of the many.” In this way, “medieval feudalism did not separate public from private authority…[and] a ruler [spoke] for the general interest only insofar as it [coincided] with his own interest. Private corporations will become the new (virtual) feudal lords” (Mowshowitz 16). The executives of these corporations will exert a kind of absolute control over their workers that was discussed earlier in terms of post-modernism.
Control through the idealized form of consumerism will be, in my opinion, stronger than any contractual ties evidenced in the classical feudal ages. In fact, it will be more similar to the psychological immobilization that was exerted by the centralized Catholic Church, which, in the feudal era, used religious ideals to control the subordinate majority by promising salvation in the afterlife for a life of quiet servitude to its feudal lords. A similar sort of brainwashing will convince otherwise rational consumers in the post-modernistic era to the irrationality of subordination to the tenets of materialism, as dictated by the multinational lords through advertising in the mass media. Because this sort of control is psychological, it relates somewhat to the threat to
Thus we see all of the elements of this paper come together under the heading of McFeudalization. It is a stark vision of the future, to be sure, but one that is already under way. Perhaps it is stark because it appears to be so different from our own, or because it seems to value different ideals from our traditional beliefs of a healthy society. The McDonaldization of society as Ritzer envisioned it truly has more scope and, in some ways, potential reality when combined with Mowshowitz’s virtual organization. Its comparison to the classical medieval ages gives one a concrete picture of how future society may look and operate. But is it something we should fear? Mowshowitz makes it clear that the term feudalism has traditionally “negative connotations” in that it relates to an era known for its “regressive, inequitable” nature, while the reality is that feudalism is only another form of organization in society, one that, at the time, fit the many constraints of post-Roman medieval Europe (Mowshowitz 19). He goes on to argue that “virtual feudalism” is simply the best possible known system that will successfully support the realities of the global consumer society. So, in the natural cycle of the rise and fall of civilizations, “virtual feudalism” and the general trend of McFeudalization are simply the next step in the advancement and progress of humanity as a whole. Whatever the case, it has been proven that the current system of national governments is having major structural problems adhering to the new service economy and globalization, and these problems will only get worse unless something gives to accommodate to the global changes taking place.
Whether my point about the legitimacy of the McFeudalization was successfully made or not, one cannot ignore the evidence that was presented as support for the argument. Mowshowitz, Ritzer, Schiller, as well as the other sources presented in this paper are contemporary intellectuals of superior accreditation whose research and publications are not only recent, but for the most part critically acclaimed by their peers. Given the limited scope of this paper, perhaps not enough was done to give justice to such a radical social process as McFeudalization. However, McDonaldization has been researched quite extensively by Ritzer for many years, and Mowshowitz’s virtual organization has been in the works for over thirty years; both theories are closely following recent changes in the socio-economic nature of contemporary society and both are still very much valid. If not McFeudalization, the theories of McDonaldization and virtual organization should be taken seriously not only by intellectuals in sociological circles but also, and more importantly, by citizens of the radically changing world. Awareness of such significant trends in society should be spread so that the common man of this still-representative world of national governments can have a say in the future that unfolds, before it is too late. The worst that can happen, in my opinion, is that the people of this world will be thrown unaware into a future they didn’t really want, a future that they did not consciously create.
Works Cited
Luxenberg, Stan. “Help Wanted.” Roadside Empires: How the Chains Franchised
Miller, Daniel. Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach.
Mowshowitz, Abbe. Virtual Organization.
Mowshowitz, Abbe. “Virtual Organization: The New Feudalism.” Computer. April 2001: Online.
Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society.
Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization Thesis.
Roberts, Shirley. Harness the Future: The 9 Keys to Emerging Consumer Behavior.
Schiller, Dan. Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System.
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.
Talwar, Jennifer Parker. Fast Food, Fast Track.
Ullman, Walter. The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages.
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