37 Facts About George Ritzer

1.

George Ritzer coined the term after writing The McDonaldization of Society, which is among the best selling monographs in the history of American sociology.

2.

George Ritzer is currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park.

3.

George Ritzer was born in 1940 to a Jewish family in upper Manhattan, New York City.

4.

George Ritzer's father was a taxicab driver and his mother was a secretary; he has one brother.

5.

When his father contracted what George Ritzer referred to as "a strange illness," speculated to be from his job as a taxi driver, George Ritzer's mother had to do so much as to break open the family's piggy bank, where they stored half dollars, to provide for the family.

6.

George Ritzer graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1958, stating to have "encountered the brightest people I have ever met in my life".

7.

George Ritzer began his higher education at City College of New York, a free college at the time.

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8.

George Ritzer stated in an interview that he was a student at CCNY when he first stepped inside a McDonalds, which greatly juxtaposed the distinct culture of restaurants and stores in New York.

9.

George Ritzer reported that at Michigan, he was able to grow and improve as a student.

10.

George Ritzer enrolled in Cornell University's School of Labor and Industrial Relations Ph.

11.

George Ritzer continued to succeed in sociology courses at the graduate level.

12.

George Ritzer's professor stated that the paper was "too long not to be good".

13.

George Ritzer attributed his talent of being able to compete with well-read and experienced sociology students to his work ethic.

14.

George Ritzer never earned a degree in sociology but studied psychology and business.

15.

George Ritzer began his sociological work writing theory connecting his minimal sociological education alongside the experiences that struck him when first experiencing the McDonalds chain stores.

16.

George Ritzer's idea of McDonaldization is an extension of Max Weber's classical theory of the rationalization of modern society and culture.

17.

Weber famously used the terminology "iron cage" to describe the stultifying, Kafkaesque effects of bureaucratized life, and George Ritzer applied this idea to an influential social system in the twenty-first century: McDonald's.

18.

George Ritzer argues that McDonald's restaurants have become the better example of current forms of instrumental rationality and its ultimately irrational and harmful consequences on people George Ritzer shared similar views as Max Weber about the topic of rationalization.

19.

An early admirer of Jean Baudrillard's Consumer Society, George Ritzer is a leading proponent of the study of consumption.

20.

George Ritzer is a founding editor, with Don Slater, of SAGE's Journal of Consumer Culture.

21.

George Ritzer argues that prosumption is the primordial form of economic activities, and the current ideal separation between production and consumption is aberrant and distorted due to the effect of both Industrial Revolution and post-WWII American consumption boom.

22.

George Ritzer argues that we should view all economic activities on a continuum of prosumption with prosumption as production and prosumption as consumption on each pole.

23.

George Ritzer believes that things that embody the "nothing" component of this dichotomy are taking over and pushing "something" out of society.

24.

George Ritzer explains the advantages and disadvantages of both "something" and "nothing" in The McDonaldization of Society.

25.

George Ritzer defines it as involving a worldwide diffusion of practices, relations, and forms of social organization and the growth of global consciousness.

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26.

Grobalization, a term coined by George Ritzer himself, refers to "imperialistic ambitions of nations, corporations, organizations, and the like and their desire, indeed need, to impose themselves on various geographic areas".

27.

George Ritzer further explains Glocalization as a relatively benign process that is closest to the "something" end of things.

28.

George Ritzer has written about this term in his own works, demonstrating its connection to globalization and "something vs nothing".

29.

George Ritzer is known to generations of students as the author of numerous comprehensive introductions and compendia in social theory.

30.

George Ritzer has edited three encyclopedias, including the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology.

31.

George Ritzer has written approximately one hundred scholarly articles in respected journals.

32.

George Ritzer discusses what implications this has for the field of sociology.

33.

George Ritzer proposes an integrated paradigm dealing with the interrelationships between the many levels of social reality.

34.

George Ritzer describes this as the process by which the principles of the fast food restaurants are coming to dominate more and more sectors of society in the United States as well as the rest of the world.

35.

George Ritzer is most well known for The McDonaldization of Society, which has five different editions and has sold over 175,000 copies as of 2007.

36.

George Ritzer continues to explore this book's central thesis: that our society has undergone fundamental change because of the way and the level at which we consume.

37.

George Ritzer loves to travel, oftentimes using the work trips as a time for a mini vacation with his wife.