McDonaldization Assignment Page
From Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks, Calif:Pine Forge Press. 1996. Pp. 20-21.
The bureaucracy also suffers from the irrationality of rationality. Like the fast-food restaurant, it is a dehumanizing place in which to work and by which to be serviced. As Ronald Takaki put it, these rationalized settings are places in which "the self was placed in confinement, its emotions controlled, and its spirit subdued." In other words, they are settings in which people cannot behave as human beings, where people are dehumanized.
But the irrationalities of bureaucracies hardly stop there. Instead of remaining efficient, bureaucracies can become increasingly inefficient because of "red tape" and the other pathologies associated with them. Bureaucracies often become unpredictable as employees grow unclear about what they are supposed to do and clients do not get the services they expect. The emphasis on quantification often leads to large amounts of poor-quality work. Because of these and other inadequacies, bureaucracies begin to lose control over those who work within and are served by them. Anger at the nonhuman technologies that can replace them often lead people to undercut or sabotage the operation of these technologies. All in all, what were designed as highly rational operations often end up quite irrational.
Although Weber was concerned about the irrationalities of formally rationalized systems such as bureaucracies, he was even more animated by what he called the "iron cage of rationality." In Weber's view, bureaucracies are cages in the sense that people are trapped in them, their basic humanity denied. Weber feared most that these systems would grow more and more rational and that rational principles would come to dominate an accelerating number of sectors of society. Weber anticipated a society of people locked into a series of rational structures, who could move only from one rational system to another. Thus, people would move from rationalized educational institutions to rationalized work places, from rationalized recreational settings to rationalized homes. Society would become nothing more than a seamless web of rationalized structures; there would be no escape.