1
Beyond the McDonaldization of higher education
Dennis Hayes
McDonaldâs are good at McDonaldization. Universities are not good at McDonaldization. They do it badly, like many of the cheap faux-McDonaldâs burger outlets on high streets and side streets around the world. When you buy a McDonaldâs meal in any of their outlets around the world, it is nutritious (see Johnson 2013) and much the same everywhere â with slight local variations and bits on the side, such as beer in France, and you love it, or you donât.
Two years ago while researching for a paper which would revisit some of the themes of The McDonaldization of Higher Education (Hayes and Wynyard 2002), I was generally optimistic about the potential for challenging McDonaldizing tendenciesin universities (see Hayes and Wynyard 20161). I was playful about what I called the âMcDonaldization Gameâ (see below). But, as the paper was going to press I became subject to the Weberian pessimism that afflicts George Ritzer, who coined the term âMcDonaldizationâ to describe industrial process of rationalisation that were expanding beyond industry into the cultural and educational spheres. The reason was a renewed awareness of the consequences of McDonaldization in higher education at individual, institutional and governmental levels. At the individual level I had an experience of how distressing and destructive the process can be. It concerns Academic Workload Planning (AWP). This is a system in use in many UK universities to allocate staff hours. Using a maximum number of hours â 1600 per annum â time is allocated for teaching to a maximum of 550 hours (a contractual requirement) and the rest for marking and administrative duties according to a variety of judgments or formulae. In many universities a variety of tariffs cover âresearch and scholarshipâ. In the case I am about to discuss an allocation of 200 hours had been made in line with the standard tariff at my university.
A colleague came to see me in some distress because of what her line manager had said about an invitation she had been given to speak at a major conference. The managerâs response was that as she had used up her 200 hours for scholarly activity she would have to take annual leave if she wished to give her talk! Ridiculous and punitive bean counting of this sort is a result of applying assembly-line approaches to university life. But it seems academics are comfortable with this aspect of McDonaldization and donât see it as irrational. They may believe what their managers and their unions tell them, that AWP produces a better âworkâlife balanceâ. There was nothing âbalancedâ in this approach as far as my colleague was concerned. She experienced considerable disenchantment due to one of the âirrationalities of rationalityâ (Ritzer 2002: 19).
At the institutional level I became more aware of how destructive the McDonaldization process is after reading Eric Margolisâ personal account of his experience of McDonaldization at Arizona State University (ASU) from its rebranding in 2002 as âThe New American Universityâ (Margolis 2013). It is a depressing picture. Margolis sees rebranding as the most visible aspect of McDonaldization. In order to meet the demands of the twenty-first century, ASU created âtransdisciplinary schoolsâ so that the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences was composed of:
⢠Earth and Space Exploration
⢠Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning
⢠Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies
⢠Human Communication
⢠Human Evolution and Social Change
⢠International Letters and Cultures Life Sciences
⢠Mathematical and Statistical Sciences
⢠Politics and Global Studies
⢠Social and Family Dynamics
⢠Social Transformation
⢠Transborder Studies
(Margolis 2013: 255)
As Margolis says, âThis is not simply about name changing, which might simply be amusingly pretentious. It is about disrupting the power of academic departments and their connections to larger disciplines and professional organizations. While there are sociologists in Communication, Justice and Social Inquiry, and so on, there is no department of sociologyâ (Margolis 2013: 255). In the UK in my own discipline of education similar name changes are common, with departments and centres being rebranded with new names such as âChildren, Families and Communitiesâ and the ubiquitous label âWellbeingâ as in âEducation, Health and Wellbeingâ. The effect, if not the intention, is also to disrupt academic subjects and departments.
Furthermore, the whole university was subject to âeight design aspirationsâ to âguide ASUâs transformationâ:
1. Leverage Our Place ASU embraces its cultural, socioeconomic and, physical setting.
2. Transform Society ASU catalyzes social change by being connected to social needs.
3. Value Entrepreneurship ASU uses its knowledge and encourages innovation.
4. Conduct Use-Inspired Research ASU research has purpose and impact.
5. Enable Student Success ASU is committed to the success of each unique student.
6. Fuse Intellectual Disciplines ASU creates knowledge by transcending academic disciplines.
7. Be Socially Embedded ASU connects with communities through mutually beneficial partnerships.
8. Engage Globally ASU engages with people and issues locally, nationally and internationally.
(Margolis 2013: 257)
These statements are familiar from the mission statements of many UK universities, but Margolis underplays their potential damage to the disciplines. They are, he says âeither free-floating signifiers empty of content, or simply a publicistâs restatement of what every university strives forâ (Margolis 2013: 257). In reality, they direct the university towards extrinsic ends and away from the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, something which is true of every mission statement.
Rebranding is something that is almost a constant in UK universities. Until I read Margolis I had thought such name changing to be âamusingly pretentiousâ or politically opportunistic. The realisation that they constitute an attack on academic disciplines was new to me, and it was depressing.
Most depressing of all was the announcement at the governmental level of a further and even more destructive development in the ongoing process of McDonaldization. After reporting on the growth in national and international league tables for many years and thinking it couldnât get any worse, it did. The UK government announced it was going to introduce a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). What this means is slowly becoming clear, but even in setting out its ideas about the TEF, the House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee recognise that 86 per cent of students are satisfied with their course. Nevertheless, they aim âto encourage excellent teaching for all studentsâ (House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee 2016: 5). Writing in 2002 on the âsophistryâ of teacher training for higher education it was clear that teaching in universities was fine and university lecturers did not need teacher training courses or a professional body supporting teaching (see Hayes 2002). The same is true today, but we are about to have an exercise imposed upon the sector that will rival the Research Excellence Framework in its time-consuming and stultifying effects. The sector loves league tables, and vice-chancellors, National Teaching Fellows and university learning enhancement teams mostly welcome the TEF.
Universities in the UK and, to a lesser extent, in America are now McDonaldized, even if we do not see the golden arches over campus buildings (see Hayes and Ritzer, Chapter 3 in this volume, and Margolis 2013: 258). We may as well have them there because the McDonaldization of higher education has been unchallenged. Part of the reason for this is that the McDonaldization process is not a bureaucratic attempt to turn the university into a factory but to rationalise and improve higher education for students and academics. To understand why the process of McDonaldization fails in its original intention, we have to understand the process and its appeal. A good place to start is with the global appeal of McDonaldâs.
McDonaldâs: founding a university near you?
McDonaldâs has over 34,000 outlets worldwide and over 2,000 in China. It is hard not to be impressed by the growth and impact of McDonaldâs since Ray Kroc opened the first of his restaurants in Des Plaines, Illinois, on 15 April 1955. It was in Shanghai that McDonaldâs opened its eighth Hamburger University in 2010. The Hamburger University has also come a long way since Fred Turner, who was Ray Krocâs first grill man and subsequently senior chairman of McDonaldâs, founded the first in the basement of a McDonaldâs in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. Famously, McDonaldâs set up a $40 million Hamburger University in 1981 at its headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, and then six others worldwide. Shanghai Hamburger U. was set up at a cost of $250 million, but there is no training in hamburgerology on campus. The focus is on business management and efficiency and, with its 1 per cent student acceptance rate, itâs harder to get into than Harvard. McDonaldâs expansion is a global success story, and there are positive reviews of its training and business programmes (Telegraph 2010; Epstein 2012; Economist 2013; Bloomberg News 2011; Chalabi and Burn-Murdoch 2013; McDonalds.com 2014).
In terms of cultural study, from its origins to the twenty-first century, McDonaldâs has seemingly landscaped an entirely new world culture. Through its expansion it has established food as a new social and political power broker with consequent communication norms and mores in an increasingly globalized world. It has created its own sign community by a variety of means with its own vocabulary and grammar. By changing our established conventions to food it has enabled a mutual reframing of us to our social context.
George Ritzer: the living embodiment of a concept
A similar sociological success story attaches to George Ritzer, who is recognized as the person who coined the term âMcDonaldizationâ in the 1980s (Ritzer 1983) and through numerous publications spread the concept around the world. Ritzer has cooked up a sociological industry and a popular way of looking at culture. His seminal work The McDonaldization of Society was first published in 1993 and is, at the time of writing, in its eighth edition. Translated into over a dozen languages and with sales in the hundreds of thousands of copies, it has been supplemented by other works, including CDs, and by other writers, including ourselves. Ritzerâs success with the term comes in part from the fact that, as Krishan Kumar points out, it ânicely points to the exemplary role of one of the most successful contemporary practitioners of Weberian rationalizationâ (Kumar 1995: 189). As the blurb on one edition says, it is popular with students because the book âconnects the everyday world of the âtwenty-somethingâ consumer with sociological analysisâ (Fifth Edition, Ritzer 2008).
Reading The McDonaldization of Society it is easy to get carried away, as many students are, by its grandiose narrative and its sweeping claims: âThe contention of this text, however, is that McDonaldization and its âmodernâ characteristics are not only with us for the foreseeable future, but also are spreading their influence at an accelerating rate throughout the rest of society ⌠McDonaldâs will remain powerful until the nature of society has changed so dramatically that McDonaldâs is no longer able to adapt to itâ (Ritzer 1993: 152, 159). That unspecified abstract âchangeâ is unlikely. Even Ritzerâs newly coined rival, the âStarbuckization of Societyâ, though it suggests a powerful, softened McDonaldization with an emphasis on escape, education and quality, is emphatically rejected as a possible alternative explanatory metaphor âwith a clear and resounding â No!â (Ritzer 2008: 224).
McDonaldization is the global force which is affecting all of society in a way not previously explained in the narratives of Post-Fordism and bureaucratization. Consistent with those previous explanations of social change, Ritzer cautions that McDonaldization has negative and dehumanizing or âirrationalâ consequences.
In order to explain his thesis, Ritzer sends out four horsemen of his particular apocalypse. As he says, âmany of us, either as individuals or as representatives of various institutions, have come to value efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control, and seek them out whether or not there are economic gains involvedâ (1993: 149). These four dimensions of McDonaldization can be forced into fitting almost any societal occurrence, so we can have McDoctors, McDentists, McChurch, McSex, McFamily and so the list goes on (for more examples, see McDonaldization: The Reader [Ritzer 2002, 2009]).
Part of the problem with the McDonaldization thesis is that it rests on shaky theoretical suppositions. This is largely drawn from the work of the German sociologist Max Weber, in particular the âiron cageâ metaphor in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber 1930). This Ritzer utilizes in conjunction with Weberâs ideas regarding the growth of bureaucracy in the West with its attendant rationalization process: âMcDonaldization is an amplification and extension of Weberâs theory of rationalizationâ (Ritzer 2000: 23). Ritzer also takes from Weberâs work what he perceives as general pessimism as to the way society is evolving.
Weber generally argued that technology, like everything else in culture, would be subsumed under a growing cloak of rationality. In a pessimistic turn about the perils of advancing technology and the growth of acquisitive greed it brought in its train, Ritzer assumes that Weber argued that the process was irreversible when he said, âcare for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the saint like a light cloak which can be thrown aside at any moment. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cageâ (Weber 1930: 117).
The whole basis of Ritzerâs McDonaldization thesis stems from this particular reading of Weber. It is, as Robin Wynyard and I have argued previously, based on treating Weberâs important explanatory concepts in a somewhat cavalier way (Hayes and Wynyard 2002: 2â7). Rationalization gets short shrift, being simply replaced by the âmore timelyâ label âMcDonaldizationâ (Ritzer 1993: xiii), and Ritzer attempts to link other concepts into some explanatory format: rationality â bureaucracy â irrationality â iron cage. The difference is the cannibalisation of these ideas. The rationalisation process for Ritzer causes a world-wide materialistic âiron cageâ which is inevitable and inescapable. Weber saw that the âiron cageâ is the expression of the âinexorable powerâ of material possessions over people (Weber 1930: 181) but allowed for the possibility of the cage door being opened in the future by some human agency, or âprophetsâ as he calls them (Weber 1930: 182). Though both Weber and Ritzer share a similar pessimistic platform, â[f]or Weber, the cage door is at least slightly ajar, where for Ritzer it is firmly shutâ (Hayes and Wynyard 2002: 7).
To return to the appeal of Ritzerâs McDonaldization thesis to students, there is an ever present irony in the sociological foundation of his work. Ritzer has simply and cleverly McDonaldized Weberâs thinking and reduced it to four easily digestible nuggets of thought: efficiency, predictability, calculability and control.
McDonaldization of higher education
In the first edition of The McDonaldization of Society, Ritzer paints a depressing picture of the university:
The modern university has, in various ways, become a highly irrational place. Many students (and faculty members) are put off by the huge factory-like atmosphere in these universities. They might feel like automatons processed by the bureaucracy and the computer or ...
