Lecture 8, Rationalization & Globalization

In The Globalization of Nothing, George Ritzer is describing two types of culture. One is culture that people create for themselves and the other is culture that is created by others. In the past humans created almost all of their own culture. They made their own clothing, houses, tools, music, art, and social relationships. Today much of this work is done by others. Ritzer suggests that we have now moved into a situation where others make a lot of the culture we live in and that increasingly, those others are located in another part of the world.

Much of this argument is based on a concept developed by a sociologist named Max Weber. To fully understand Ritzer's argument, we need to understand the concept of rationalization. Max Weber (pronounced Veber) was a sociologist who lived from 1864 until 1920. During his adult life he saw the industrial revolution become entrenched in Europe and the United States, urbanization become a way of life in industrial nations, science take over as the most important way of knowing, and capitalism become the dominant economic system in the world

As he studied these social processes in Western societies he became interested in one that seemed to him to be a dominant, underlying explanation for much that he observed. He called this particular large scale process rationalization.

When Weber wrote about rationalization, he didn’t conceptualize it the way most of us commonly think about it. We tend to think of rationalization in a psychological way (as a way of justifying our actions or making excuses for things we want to do) or in an economic sense where rational means acting in our own self interest. Weber, in contrast, defined rationalization as the process through which the modern world has become increasingly dominated by a concern with efficiency, predictability, calculability, and “dehumanization.” Weber defined rationalization as the process through which the modern world has become increasingly dominated by a concern with efficiency, predictability, calculability, and “dehumanization.” Weber saw all of these elements as complementing and reinforcing each other as they supported industrialization and capitalism. They were first apparent in governmental bureaucracies but have spread to all parts of society. While Weber was not thinking of rationalization as a cultural change, that is exactly what he was describing. Effiiciency, prdictability, & calculability are cultural values. They become part of our everyday lives and part of us. Dehumanization is also a cultural process although not a value. Many sociologists would argue that proliferation of violence in the media and entertainment is part of this process of dehumanization. Media and entertainment, as products of human activity, both create and reflect culture.

It is probably useful to break down the various parts of Weber’s definition. It contains a lot of concepts that need to be understood. By predictability he meant a desire and necessity to predict the future. While humans have always, it appears, been concerned with knowing about the future, predictability has become far more important to us than it was in the past. The need and desire to know what will happen permeates every aspect of our daily lives from the weather to elections to how many parts we will need in the factory next year. Hours and hours of television are devoted to political pundits attempting to predict the President’s next move. Hours and hours of corporate time are spent trying to figure out what consumers will want next year. Everything from traffic signals to airline schedules are examples of how much we like to be able to predict things. Calculability refers to a concern with numbers. Counting, tabulating, scoring, and statistics all involve numbers. One of my favorite examples is the sign McDonald’s restaurants used to display, before the numbers got too big, touting how many hamburgers had been sold. Such displays tell us nothing about quality but the numbers are impressive. Another example is a college student’s grade point average. We manage to sum up a whole college career in one number – the GPA and use it to predict success in a career. Isn’t that efficient! (See how all these concepts connect?) Sports statistics are another example of calculability or a concern with numbers. Sports fans are endlessly fascinated with home run averages, passes completed, or baskets scored. No need to talk about how calculability affects businesses. The concern with the “bottom line” says it all. Efficiency speaks for itself. It is a goal most of us strive for because we must. It is very difficult to survive in modern society if one is not efficient. Businesses certainly can’t. Wasting time or money is fatal in our competitive marketplace. Individuals, like ourselves, who juggle home, work, school, and maybe a bit of leisure time, can’t afford inefficiency either. We’d get behind! We struggle to find the most efficient ways to do things, partly because we have come to value efficiency as a good thing in its own right (who wants to be inefficient?) but mostly because we must. We buy millions of gadgets every year (palm pilots, food processors, diet plans, educational software) hoping to become more efficient and buy ourselves more time.

I hope that you can see that these processes, predictability, calculability, efficiency, are not freely chosen. They, together with other elements, form a system that pushes us around in our daily lives. They shape how we live our lives and, ultimately, the people we become. They are interconnected with our technologies to shape how we spend our time. Automobiles allowed us to become more efficient, to get from place to place faster and faster. Trucks enabled us to transport goods quicker and at a lower cost. We could also be more confident that we or the things we sent would arrive on time. So, it became necessary that we and our things and our things arrive on time. And then it became essential. We use automobiles but they control us in many ways. And so we come to the fourth component in Weber’s concept of rationalization – dehumanization or the use of technology to control human behavior. The societal and cultural stress on predictability, calculability, and efficiency combine to give us fewer and fewer choices about the way we spend our lives and use our time. We are dehumanized by the very technologies we use. Assembly lines are the classic example of using technology to control people but there are hundreds of others. Fast food restaurants are designed to move people in and out as fast as possible to make room for more. They even design the seats to be uncomfortable so people don’t stay long! Most large companies have now implemented automated answering systems that require you to push forty-seven (I know, I’ve counted them! Get it? Calculability?) buttons before you get to talk to a real person. That’s dehumanizing. Standing in long lines at Disneyland, being subjected to strip searches at airports, and not being able to fix your own car because it has too many computerized parts are the result of rationalized processes in the modern capitalist economy and all treat us as parts of system rather than as individuals with special characteristics and needs. Note that no sociologist is saying that dehumanization is the result of a plot by the government or corporate CEOs to control us. Quite the contrary, it is the result of large scale social processes inherent in our society and dependent on the technologies we have available. We, all of us together, have created and participate in a system that uses technology to control our lives. Given the time and place in which we live, rationalization probably makes sense and is certainly unavoidable. It meshes so well with our modern economic, educational, and political institutions that it would be impossible to change without a serious disruption in society. Like it or not, we are sort of stuck with rationalization. The best we can do is to understand the process, the consequences, and the trade-offs. That’s our goal in this class.

Ritzer is, in essence, carrying the concept of rationalization one step further in saying that rationalization is now seen not just in the Western world but all over the globe. These powerful elements in American culture are being exported through the spread of capitalism and Americanization.

Weber’s concept of rationalization allows us to understand a great deal about the modern systems we live in. It illustrates how the sociological imagination can be used to see the processes that affect our lives and how we live them. I hope you find it useful for understanding the processes of globalization, localization, and grobalization that Ritzer describes.