Sunday, June 29, 2008
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Cram school
Elite Korean Schools, Forging Ivy League Skills
SEOUL, South Korea — It is 10:30 p.m. and students at the elite Daewon prep school here are cramming in a study hall that ends a 15-hour school day. A window is propped open so the evening chill can keep them awake. One teenager studies standing upright at his desk to keep from dozing.
A student and teacher at an elite South Korean school, the Minjok Leadership Academy, where sights are set on the Ivy League. More Photos »
Kim Hyun-kyung, who has accumulated nearly perfect scores on her SATs, is multitasking to prepare for physics, chemistry and history exams.
“I can’t let myself waste even a second,” said Ms. Kim, who dreams of attending Harvard, Yale or another brand-name American college. And she has a good shot. This spring, as in previous years, all but a few of the 133 graduates from Daewon Foreign Language High School who applied to selective American universities won admission.
It is a success rate that American parents may well envy, especially now, as many students are swallowing rejection from favorite universities at the close of an insanely selective college application season.
“Going to U.S. universities has become like a huge fad in Korean society, and the Ivy League names — Harvard, Yale, Princeton — have really struck a nerve,” said Victoria Kim, who attended Daewon and graduated from Harvard last June.
Daewon has one major Korean rival, the Minjok Leadership Academy, three hours’ drive east of Seoul, which also has a spectacular record of admission to Ivy League colleges.
How do they do it? Their formula is relatively simple. They take South Korea’s top-scoring middle school students, put those who aspire to an American university in English-language classes, taught by Korean and highly paid American and other foreign teachers, emphasize composition and other skills crucial to success on the SATs and college admissions essays, and — especially this — urge them on to unceasing study.
Both schools seem to be rethinking their grueling regimen, at least a bit. Minjok, a boarding school, has turned off dormitory surveillance cameras previously used to ensure that students did not doze in late-night study sessions. Daewon is ending its school day earlier for freshmen. Its founder, Lee Won-hee, worried in an interview that while Daewon was turning out high-scoring students, it might be falling short in educating them as responsible citizens.
“American schools may do a better job at that,” Dr. Lee said.
Still, the schools are highly rigorous. Both supplement South Korea’s required, lecture-based national curriculum with Western-style discussion classes. Their academic year is more than a month longer than at American high schools. Daewon, which costs about $5,000 per year to attend, requires two foreign languages besides English. Minjok, where tuition, board and other expenses top $15,000, offers Advanced Placement courses and research projects.
And, oh yes. Both schools suppress teenage romance as a waste of time.
“What are you doing holding hands?” a Daewon administrator scolded an adolescent couple recently, according to his aides. “You should be studying!”
Students do not seem to complain. Park Yeshong, one of Kim Hyun-kyung’s classmates, said attractions tended to fade during hundreds of hours of close-quarters study. “We know each other too well to fall in love,” she said. Many American educators would kill to have such disciplined pupils.
Both schools reserve admission for highly motivated students; the application process resembles that at many American colleges, where students are judged on their grade-point averages, as well as their performance on special tests and in interviews.
“Even my worst students are great,” said Joseph Foster, a Williams College graduate who teaches writing at Daewon. “They’re professionals; if I teach them, they’ll learn it. I get e-mails at 2 a.m. I’ll respond and go to bed. When I get up, I’ll find a follow-up question mailed at 5 a.m.”
Korean applications to Harvard alone have tripled, to 213 this spring, up from 66 in 2003, said William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions. Harvard has 37 Korean undergraduates, more than from any foreign country except Canada and Britain. Harvard, Yale and Princeton have a total of 103 Korean undergraduates; 34 graduated from Daewon or Minjok.
This year, Daewon and Minjok graduates are heading to universities like Stanford, Chicago, Duke and seven of the eight Ivy League universities — but not to Harvard. Instead, Harvard accepted four Korean students from three other prep schools.
“That was certainly not any statement” about the Daewon and Minjok schools, Mr. Fitzsimmons said. “We’re alert to getting kids from schools where we haven’t had them before, but we’d never reject an applicant simply because he or she came from a school with a history of sending students to Harvard.”
South Korea’s academic year starts in March, so the 2008 class of Daewon’s Global Leadership Program, which prepares students for study at foreign universities, graduated in February.
One graduate was Kim Soo-yeon, 19, who was accepted by Princeton this month. Daewon parents tend to be wealthy doctors, lawyers or university professors. Ms. Kim’s father is a top official in the Korean Olympic Committee.
Ms. Kim developed fierce study habits early, watching her mother scold her older sister for receiving any score less than 100 on tests. Even a 98 or a 99 brought a tongue-lashing.
“Most Korean mothers want their children to get 100 on all the tests in all the subjects,” Ms. Kim’s mother said.
Ms. Kim’s highest aspiration was to attend a top Korean university, until she read a book by a Korean student at Harvard about American universities. Immediately she put up a sign in her bedroom: “I’m going to an Ivy League!”
Even while at Daewon, Ms. Kim, like thousands of Korean students, took weekend classes in English, physics and other subjects at private academies, raising her SAT scores by hundreds of points. “I just love to do well on the tests,” she said.
As bright as she is, she was just one great student among many, said Eric Cho, Daewon’s college counselor. Sitting at his computer terminal at the school, perched on a craggy eastern hilltop overlooking the Seoul skyline, Mr. Cho scrolled through the class of 2008’s academic records.
Their average combined SAT score was 2203 out of 2400. By comparison, the average combined score at Phillips Exeter, the New Hampshire boarding school, is 2085. Sixty-seven Daewon graduates had perfect 800 math scores.
Kim Hyun-kyung, 17, scored perfect 800s on the SAT verbal and math tests, and 790 in writing. She is scheduled to take nine Advanced Placement tests next month, in calculus, physics, chemistry, European history and five other subjects. One challenge: she has taken none of these courses. Instead, she is teaching herself in between classes at Daewon, buying and devouring textbooks.
So she is busy. She rises at 6 a.m. and heads for her school bus at 6:50. Arriving at Daewon, she grabs a broom to help classmates clean her classroom. Between 8 and noon, she hears Korean instructors teach supply and demand in economics, Korean soils in geography and classical poets in Korean literature.
At lunch she joins other raucous students, all, like her, wearing blue blazers, in a chow line serving beans and rice, fried dumpling and pickled turnip, which she eats with girlfriends. Boys, who sit elsewhere, wolf their food and race to a dirt lot for a 10-minute pickup soccer game before afternoon classes.
Kim Hyun-kyung joins other girls at a hallway sink to brush her teeth before reporting to French literature, French culture and English grammar classes, taught by Korean instructors. At 3:20, her English language classes begin. This day, they include English literature, taught by Mani Tadayon, a polyglot graduate of the University of California at Berkeley who was born in Iran, and government and politics, taught by Hugh Quigley, a former Wall Street lawyer.
Evening study hall begins at 7:45. She piles up textbooks on an adjoining desk, where they glare at her like a to-do list. Classmates sling backpacks over seats, prop a window open and start cramming. Three hours later, the floor is littered with empty juice cartons and water bottles. One girl has nodded out, head on desk. At 10:50 a tone sounds, and Ms. Kim heads for a bus that will wend its way through Seoul’s towering high-rise canyons to her home, south of the Han River.
“I feel proud that I’ve endured another day,” she said.
The schedule at the Minjok academy, on a rural campus of tile-roofed buildings in forested hills, appears even more daunting. Students rise at 6 for martial arts, and thereafter, wearing full-sleeved, gray-and-black robes, plunge into a day of relentless study that ends just before midnight, when they may sleep.
But most keep cramming until 2 a.m., when dorm lights are switched off, said Gang Min-ho, a senior. Even then some students turn on lanterns and keep going, Mr. Gang said. “Basically we lead very tired lives,” he said.
Students sometimes report for classes so exhausted that Alexander Ganse, a German who teaches European history, said he asked, “Did you go to bed at all last night?”
“But we’re not only nerds!” interrupted Choi Jung-yun, who grew up in San Diego. Minjok students play sports, take part in many clubs and even have a rock band, she said. Ambassador Vershbow, who plays the drums, confirmed that with photographs that showed him jamming with Minjok’s rockers during a visit to the school last year.
There are other hints of slackening. A banner once hung on a Minjok building. “This school is a paradise for those who want to study and a hell for those who do not,” it read. But it was taken down after faculty members deemed it too harsh, said Son Eun-ju, director of counseling.
South Korea is not the only country sending more students to the United States, but it seems to be a special case. Some 103,000 Korean students study at American schools of all levels, more than from any other country, according to American government statistics. In higher education, only India and China, with populations more than 20 times that of South Korea’s, send more students.
“Preparing to get to the best American universities has become something of a national obsession in Korea,” said Alexander Vershbow, the American ambassador to South Korea.
SEOUL, South Korea — It is 10:30 p.m. and students at the elite Daewon prep school here are cramming in a study hall that ends a 15-hour school day. A window is propped open so the evening chill can keep them awake. One teenager studies standing upright at his desk to keep from dozing.
A student and teacher at an elite South Korean school, the Minjok Leadership Academy, where sights are set on the Ivy League. More Photos »
Kim Hyun-kyung, who has accumulated nearly perfect scores on her SATs, is multitasking to prepare for physics, chemistry and history exams.
“I can’t let myself waste even a second,” said Ms. Kim, who dreams of attending Harvard, Yale or another brand-name American college. And she has a good shot. This spring, as in previous years, all but a few of the 133 graduates from Daewon Foreign Language High School who applied to selective American universities won admission.
It is a success rate that American parents may well envy, especially now, as many students are swallowing rejection from favorite universities at the close of an insanely selective college application season.
“Going to U.S. universities has become like a huge fad in Korean society, and the Ivy League names — Harvard, Yale, Princeton — have really struck a nerve,” said Victoria Kim, who attended Daewon and graduated from Harvard last June.
Daewon has one major Korean rival, the Minjok Leadership Academy, three hours’ drive east of Seoul, which also has a spectacular record of admission to Ivy League colleges.
How do they do it? Their formula is relatively simple. They take South Korea’s top-scoring middle school students, put those who aspire to an American university in English-language classes, taught by Korean and highly paid American and other foreign teachers, emphasize composition and other skills crucial to success on the SATs and college admissions essays, and — especially this — urge them on to unceasing study.
Both schools seem to be rethinking their grueling regimen, at least a bit. Minjok, a boarding school, has turned off dormitory surveillance cameras previously used to ensure that students did not doze in late-night study sessions. Daewon is ending its school day earlier for freshmen. Its founder, Lee Won-hee, worried in an interview that while Daewon was turning out high-scoring students, it might be falling short in educating them as responsible citizens.
“American schools may do a better job at that,” Dr. Lee said.
Still, the schools are highly rigorous. Both supplement South Korea’s required, lecture-based national curriculum with Western-style discussion classes. Their academic year is more than a month longer than at American high schools. Daewon, which costs about $5,000 per year to attend, requires two foreign languages besides English. Minjok, where tuition, board and other expenses top $15,000, offers Advanced Placement courses and research projects.
And, oh yes. Both schools suppress teenage romance as a waste of time.
“What are you doing holding hands?” a Daewon administrator scolded an adolescent couple recently, according to his aides. “You should be studying!”
Students do not seem to complain. Park Yeshong, one of Kim Hyun-kyung’s classmates, said attractions tended to fade during hundreds of hours of close-quarters study. “We know each other too well to fall in love,” she said. Many American educators would kill to have such disciplined pupils.
Both schools reserve admission for highly motivated students; the application process resembles that at many American colleges, where students are judged on their grade-point averages, as well as their performance on special tests and in interviews.
“Even my worst students are great,” said Joseph Foster, a Williams College graduate who teaches writing at Daewon. “They’re professionals; if I teach them, they’ll learn it. I get e-mails at 2 a.m. I’ll respond and go to bed. When I get up, I’ll find a follow-up question mailed at 5 a.m.”
Korean applications to Harvard alone have tripled, to 213 this spring, up from 66 in 2003, said William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions. Harvard has 37 Korean undergraduates, more than from any foreign country except Canada and Britain. Harvard, Yale and Princeton have a total of 103 Korean undergraduates; 34 graduated from Daewon or Minjok.
This year, Daewon and Minjok graduates are heading to universities like Stanford, Chicago, Duke and seven of the eight Ivy League universities — but not to Harvard. Instead, Harvard accepted four Korean students from three other prep schools.
“That was certainly not any statement” about the Daewon and Minjok schools, Mr. Fitzsimmons said. “We’re alert to getting kids from schools where we haven’t had them before, but we’d never reject an applicant simply because he or she came from a school with a history of sending students to Harvard.”
South Korea’s academic year starts in March, so the 2008 class of Daewon’s Global Leadership Program, which prepares students for study at foreign universities, graduated in February.
One graduate was Kim Soo-yeon, 19, who was accepted by Princeton this month. Daewon parents tend to be wealthy doctors, lawyers or university professors. Ms. Kim’s father is a top official in the Korean Olympic Committee.
Ms. Kim developed fierce study habits early, watching her mother scold her older sister for receiving any score less than 100 on tests. Even a 98 or a 99 brought a tongue-lashing.
“Most Korean mothers want their children to get 100 on all the tests in all the subjects,” Ms. Kim’s mother said.
Ms. Kim’s highest aspiration was to attend a top Korean university, until she read a book by a Korean student at Harvard about American universities. Immediately she put up a sign in her bedroom: “I’m going to an Ivy League!”
Even while at Daewon, Ms. Kim, like thousands of Korean students, took weekend classes in English, physics and other subjects at private academies, raising her SAT scores by hundreds of points. “I just love to do well on the tests,” she said.
As bright as she is, she was just one great student among many, said Eric Cho, Daewon’s college counselor. Sitting at his computer terminal at the school, perched on a craggy eastern hilltop overlooking the Seoul skyline, Mr. Cho scrolled through the class of 2008’s academic records.
Their average combined SAT score was 2203 out of 2400. By comparison, the average combined score at Phillips Exeter, the New Hampshire boarding school, is 2085. Sixty-seven Daewon graduates had perfect 800 math scores.
Kim Hyun-kyung, 17, scored perfect 800s on the SAT verbal and math tests, and 790 in writing. She is scheduled to take nine Advanced Placement tests next month, in calculus, physics, chemistry, European history and five other subjects. One challenge: she has taken none of these courses. Instead, she is teaching herself in between classes at Daewon, buying and devouring textbooks.
So she is busy. She rises at 6 a.m. and heads for her school bus at 6:50. Arriving at Daewon, she grabs a broom to help classmates clean her classroom. Between 8 and noon, she hears Korean instructors teach supply and demand in economics, Korean soils in geography and classical poets in Korean literature.
At lunch she joins other raucous students, all, like her, wearing blue blazers, in a chow line serving beans and rice, fried dumpling and pickled turnip, which she eats with girlfriends. Boys, who sit elsewhere, wolf their food and race to a dirt lot for a 10-minute pickup soccer game before afternoon classes.
Kim Hyun-kyung joins other girls at a hallway sink to brush her teeth before reporting to French literature, French culture and English grammar classes, taught by Korean instructors. At 3:20, her English language classes begin. This day, they include English literature, taught by Mani Tadayon, a polyglot graduate of the University of California at Berkeley who was born in Iran, and government and politics, taught by Hugh Quigley, a former Wall Street lawyer.
Evening study hall begins at 7:45. She piles up textbooks on an adjoining desk, where they glare at her like a to-do list. Classmates sling backpacks over seats, prop a window open and start cramming. Three hours later, the floor is littered with empty juice cartons and water bottles. One girl has nodded out, head on desk. At 10:50 a tone sounds, and Ms. Kim heads for a bus that will wend its way through Seoul’s towering high-rise canyons to her home, south of the Han River.
“I feel proud that I’ve endured another day,” she said.
The schedule at the Minjok academy, on a rural campus of tile-roofed buildings in forested hills, appears even more daunting. Students rise at 6 for martial arts, and thereafter, wearing full-sleeved, gray-and-black robes, plunge into a day of relentless study that ends just before midnight, when they may sleep.
But most keep cramming until 2 a.m., when dorm lights are switched off, said Gang Min-ho, a senior. Even then some students turn on lanterns and keep going, Mr. Gang said. “Basically we lead very tired lives,” he said.
Students sometimes report for classes so exhausted that Alexander Ganse, a German who teaches European history, said he asked, “Did you go to bed at all last night?”
“But we’re not only nerds!” interrupted Choi Jung-yun, who grew up in San Diego. Minjok students play sports, take part in many clubs and even have a rock band, she said. Ambassador Vershbow, who plays the drums, confirmed that with photographs that showed him jamming with Minjok’s rockers during a visit to the school last year.
There are other hints of slackening. A banner once hung on a Minjok building. “This school is a paradise for those who want to study and a hell for those who do not,” it read. But it was taken down after faculty members deemed it too harsh, said Son Eun-ju, director of counseling.
South Korea is not the only country sending more students to the United States, but it seems to be a special case. Some 103,000 Korean students study at American schools of all levels, more than from any other country, according to American government statistics. In higher education, only India and China, with populations more than 20 times that of South Korea’s, send more students.
“Preparing to get to the best American universities has become something of a national obsession in Korea,” said Alexander Vershbow, the American ambassador to South Korea.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
2 fun youtubes
1. "I will derive" (We should get certain person to sing this in math class hahaha)
2. Organic Chemistry: 7 Clues from Obi-Wan
2. Organic Chemistry: 7 Clues from Obi-Wan
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
epiphany
HUMANITIES: sociology, international relations, econs etc are core humanities through which society is modeled and predictions made. geog and hist are tools to study society, lenses through which we can learn about humanity. philo and lit are underlying skills.
(a similar comment about the sciences will earn me a lot of pokes... )
(a similar comment about the sciences will earn me a lot of pokes... )
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Celebrate... think about celebrating
see comments below
Today - Weekend, May 31, 2008
ONE of the greatest inventions in human history, and certainly the most delightful, is the celebration.
No other creature on earth celebrates. Some say the elephants have learned to mourn, and everyone knows the dolphins have learned to play. But people are the only creatures on the planet who actually celebrate a happy event.
You don’t see birds dance around an egg or antelope fuss over a birthday. And you can’t really count a doggie jumping up and down at the joy of receiving its master (doggies jump up and down at pretty much anything).
So if one of the greatest gifts of mankind is the capacity to celebrate, why is it so hard for the adult Singaporean to have a celebration?
It’s not about just having a good time. Expatriates havealready told us we don’t know how to party. When they invite us to one, we go, we eat, we hang out with our own families and then scoot early. We don’t stay and celebrate. Or party. At a party.
But the celebration is something more. It is that moment or day or period we mark something good, usually an achievement of sorts, and it can be done loud with a party or with as little as a drink at the coffeeshop with friends.
And that, it can be safely said, is not a strength of Singaporeans.
You seldom hear of people here calling for a celebration. When someone hits a milestone, they seem to look right past it to the next — an endless marathon with no tape to breast.
Okay, say we put it down to Asian modesty. We are not the sort to trumpet our achievements with a party, even though we may show off in other ways, with the flashy phone or latest car or coruscating jewellery.
Some even say it is the legacy of the immigrants’ culture. We are transients, collecting, never truly spending unless it is on an investment to make more. Gratification is waste.
Perhaps we even fear the curse of the third eye, so we look past the milestone and don’t dwell on it in case the heavens humble us with a calamity. It’s very Asian to be negative.
After all, statutory holidays aside, all our major celebrations are imported from the West, commercially manufactured events that probably bring more delight to people who run the classifieds sections than the actual targets waiting in long queues for dinner on Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Valentine’s Day.
But in modern Singapore, shouldn’t we stop now and then and mark a milestone in the life that our grandparents and parents gave up their own countries and families to build for us here?
If we could celebrate a personal milestone, invite home for a drink the ones who helped us make it possible because nothing good can be achieved only by self-will, no matter what we think — every pinnacle has a broader base.
And a thousand times better, pull together a celebration for someone we love or just like, to mark their personal milestones. Or if we are the focus of a celebration, can we accept it with grace, not embarrassment? Do we know how to receive a toast, let alone give it?
Imagine what a country we would be then. The MRT, the buses, the taxis and cars would be filled every day with a million people heading off every evening after work to a celebration of one sort or another. There would be more smiles, even for the stranger.
Now you may say this is a strange time to call for a culture of celebration when for many Singaporeans the struggle of daily life just got worse, with the price of nearly everything up by a measure. The mood, one could say, is suitably grim.
But we are already famously grim. We are one of only a handful of countries in the world, which have spent millions of taxpayers’ dollars just to ask ourselves to smile.
So perhaps it is in the tougher times we need to look for cheer the most, and flit to it like a moth to light. What else is there in life worth doing?
------------
Comments:
First, we should ask ourselves "what kind of celebration". It is a fallacy to equivocate all kinds of celebrations. An element of conspicuous, boisterous, and seemingly superficial fun seems intrinsic to the author's concept of celebration - indeed Singaporeans seem to lack this. Is this the only kind of celebration? Quiet reflection or a warm dinner would do as well, and in fact may be more valuable.
Today - Weekend, May 31, 2008
ONE of the greatest inventions in human history, and certainly the most delightful, is the celebration.
No other creature on earth celebrates. Some say the elephants have learned to mourn, and everyone knows the dolphins have learned to play. But people are the only creatures on the planet who actually celebrate a happy event.
You don’t see birds dance around an egg or antelope fuss over a birthday. And you can’t really count a doggie jumping up and down at the joy of receiving its master (doggies jump up and down at pretty much anything).
So if one of the greatest gifts of mankind is the capacity to celebrate, why is it so hard for the adult Singaporean to have a celebration?
It’s not about just having a good time. Expatriates havealready told us we don’t know how to party. When they invite us to one, we go, we eat, we hang out with our own families and then scoot early. We don’t stay and celebrate. Or party. At a party.
But the celebration is something more. It is that moment or day or period we mark something good, usually an achievement of sorts, and it can be done loud with a party or with as little as a drink at the coffeeshop with friends.
And that, it can be safely said, is not a strength of Singaporeans.
You seldom hear of people here calling for a celebration. When someone hits a milestone, they seem to look right past it to the next — an endless marathon with no tape to breast.
Okay, say we put it down to Asian modesty. We are not the sort to trumpet our achievements with a party, even though we may show off in other ways, with the flashy phone or latest car or coruscating jewellery.
Some even say it is the legacy of the immigrants’ culture. We are transients, collecting, never truly spending unless it is on an investment to make more. Gratification is waste.
Perhaps we even fear the curse of the third eye, so we look past the milestone and don’t dwell on it in case the heavens humble us with a calamity. It’s very Asian to be negative.
After all, statutory holidays aside, all our major celebrations are imported from the West, commercially manufactured events that probably bring more delight to people who run the classifieds sections than the actual targets waiting in long queues for dinner on Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Valentine’s Day.
But in modern Singapore, shouldn’t we stop now and then and mark a milestone in the life that our grandparents and parents gave up their own countries and families to build for us here?
If we could celebrate a personal milestone, invite home for a drink the ones who helped us make it possible because nothing good can be achieved only by self-will, no matter what we think — every pinnacle has a broader base.
And a thousand times better, pull together a celebration for someone we love or just like, to mark their personal milestones. Or if we are the focus of a celebration, can we accept it with grace, not embarrassment? Do we know how to receive a toast, let alone give it?
Imagine what a country we would be then. The MRT, the buses, the taxis and cars would be filled every day with a million people heading off every evening after work to a celebration of one sort or another. There would be more smiles, even for the stranger.
Now you may say this is a strange time to call for a culture of celebration when for many Singaporeans the struggle of daily life just got worse, with the price of nearly everything up by a measure. The mood, one could say, is suitably grim.
But we are already famously grim. We are one of only a handful of countries in the world, which have spent millions of taxpayers’ dollars just to ask ourselves to smile.
So perhaps it is in the tougher times we need to look for cheer the most, and flit to it like a moth to light. What else is there in life worth doing?
------------
Comments:
First, we should ask ourselves "what kind of celebration". It is a fallacy to equivocate all kinds of celebrations. An element of conspicuous, boisterous, and seemingly superficial fun seems intrinsic to the author's concept of celebration - indeed Singaporeans seem to lack this. Is this the only kind of celebration? Quiet reflection or a warm dinner would do as well, and in fact may be more valuable.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
McImposition: The subservience of consumers to the commodified fast food culture (RA Geog Assg)
ABSTRACT
The continued popularity and growth of McDonalds in the age of SuperSize Me eludes intuition. It is the result of Mcdonalds’ exploitation of the consumer, and a microcosm of larger narratives in modern consumer society. This case study provides a basis from which to elucidate the power dynamics of consumption. I will analyze various scales of dialectics: (1) individual consumers’ subservience to fast food culture, (2) The Americanized fast food culture and its erosive hegemony over local postcolonial cultures, (3) plotting McDonalds on resultant sociocultural landscapes, and (4) possible recourses, hence showing how consumers and cultures are indeed subservient but not powerless in the face of the commodifed fast food culture.
INTRODUCTION
In the age of Supersize Me, the Class Action Lawsuit, and growing consumer health consciousness, it eludes intuition how McDonald’s maintains its grip on the more than 47 million customers (McDonald’s, 2007) it serves worldwide each day. Americans spend more on fast food than on PCs, cars, and college education (Schlosser, 2002); more than a third of British adults prefer a diet consisting mainly of fast food and beer (Pryer et al, 2001). In the developing world, 2000 McDonalds open each year.
Fast Food joints are reluctant to sell just food – they may go bankrupt – rather, they shove “extra value meals” of digestive and emotional gratification down the throats of unwitting consumers, carefully-engineered to program the consumer to come back for more. How does the fast food industry pull this off?
1. THE INDIVIDUAL CONSUMER’S SUBSERVIENCE TO FAST FOOD
Capitalism is widely perceived to be the dehumanizing antithesis of aesthetic interests, and yet, one defining feature of contemporary mature capitalism is the “convergence of the economic and the cultural” (Scott, 2000), where “cultural meanings are regularly appropriated for commercial ends, and human agency subordinated to the logic of capital” (Jackson, 2002). An emphasis on meaning, identity and representation does not trump the continued capitalistic salience of the economy.
Fast food is one instance of a commodified symbolic form (after Scott, 2000), where ‘commodifed’ in the Marxian sense denotes goods and services produced for capitalist profit, and ‘symbolic form’ denotes goods with significant emotional content. McDonalds is not in the business of selling food, more importantly; they sell customers the desire to consume their food. The means and relations of production have been revolutionized, such that fast food is masked in the materiality of the commodity (after Marx: commodity fetish) - i.e. severed from the social and spatial relations that structure its productions (Goss, 1993), and given artificial and hollow meanings and social place. This meaning and place is the construct of the mammoth fast food industry, and in its face consumers are subservient “passive and vulnerable victims of the force field which they don’t understand” (Goss, 1993), such that find food wrapped in McDonald’s wrappers better tasting than identical samples in generic wrappers (Robinson, 2007). I shall now elucidate the meaning and place of fast food, and how it is constructed.
For instance, consider how McDonalds takes pride in being ‘fast’ food, an inherently quick and easy food concept because little forward planning, waiting, or clearing up is required. While time poverty is the product of the post-modern capitalist sociocultural milleu, and not fast food per se, the Fast Food industry “understands, profit from, and encourages an occupation with haste” (Gleick, 1999). McDonalds relentlessly emphasizes its speed: it once gave out free apple pies if food was not ready in 60 seconds; advertisements have drawn parallels between Tennis champion Ivanisevic’s serve (216kph) and McDonalds quick burger assembly. With relentless subliminal messaging, McDonald’s (together with the rest of capitalist society) subtly imposes on consumers the perceived threat that time is in chronically short supply, Brewis (2005) concludes that “many of us could therefore be seen as cultural slaves to M-time – we lose a more organic and rhythmic sense of time as the natural context of life”.
Similarly, fast food branding tends to juxtapose vivid, recognizable symbols (e.g. the golden arches, Ronald McDonald, the burger) alongside the corporate images McDonalds’ seeks to portray: themes of youthful exuberance or being ‘cool’, healthy lifestyles, sheer enjoyment (e.g. smiles on children’s’ faces upon getting a Happy meal), and friendship (e.g. KFC’s buddy meal). (Also note caption on page 2). McDonalds creates lifestyle and culture built around it, shaping and exploiting the sociocultural landscape for profit (this will further discussed in part 3)
There are multiplicities of forces working against McDonalds: health concerns (championed by Supersize Me), the frequent consumer’s gastronomic boredom, and the “high-cultural disdain for conspicuous mass-consumption resulting from the legacy of a puritanical fear of the moral corruption inherent in commercialism and materialism” (Goss, 1993). I extend Goss (1993)’s argument against the fear of conspicuous con-sumption in shopping malls to address fast food: McDonalds assuages this collective fear and guilt over the evils of fast food by designing a fantasized disassociation from the act of consumption (i.e. you consume the lifestyle, not the burger) to distract consumers from the emptiness of the burger.
The sheer irony of fast food being promoted as ‘healthy’, and what was cheap American street food being divorced from its history and rebranded as ‘trendy’ expounds the muscle of the fast food industry holds over consumer perceptions. The caucus locus is the social power relations of production and consumption (Sack, 1988) – the capital and the brainpower of fast food giants acting from young on the individual mind, subordinating the individual to the postmodernist “consumption of artificial and hollow signs over and above material utilities” (Baudrillard, 1981). The world is not merely represented in commodifed images, but consists of such images – the image having more substantive effect than reality (Baudrillard, 1993). It’s all a lie – one that allows McDonalds to sidestep its replaceable material utility to create an irreplaceable image consumers flock towards.
The realist view sidesteps this to state that perception does not matter, because “a real world independent of human perception” exists (Unwin, 1992). And yet the consumer’s ‘choice’ – or lack thereof – whether or not to step into McDonalds is predicated upon perception and not higher ‘truths’ that are not privy to their decision making, even if such ‘truths’ exist.
This view may seem overly deterministic; power play and presiding influences restricting the field of human agency being restricted does not prove that this agency is itself dead. We may argue that it is ultimately the consumer’s sovereign choice to step into McDonalds.
Consider, however, how “consumption undoes contexts to create contexts, undoes social relation to create social relations, and undoes meaning to create meaning” (Sack, 1988). Whether or not truth is relative, in a world where interpretations are relative, such that the “interpretation that persists at a particular time is a function of power and not truth” (Nietzsche), we see the contexts and meanings of consumption being engineered by those at the profiteering end of consumption, such that the agency of the consumer exists only within the boundaries drawn by the mammoth industry; consumer sovereignty over the consumption of the irreplaceable images and identities constituted by McDonalds is not dead, but it is a limited and elusive ideal.
2. THE AMERICANIZED FAST FOOD CULTURE AND ITS EROSIVE HEGEMONY OVER LOCAL POSTCOLONIAL CULTURES
The global McDonalds presence is not just a product of post-Fordist economic globalization, but one of cultural globalization (Americanization); the exportation of fast food is not only that of commodity but also that of culture and lifestyle. Such a culture, of course, promotes consumption and hence profits.
In this section I shall focus on postcolonial societies. In contrast with other colonial powers, such societies bear little native commonality with American culture and hence exhibit marked cultural change. I deliberately exclude societies like China, as such societies were subject to imperial power but not formal colonies, and “the colonial epoch is not the defining feature of societies with longer historical trajectories. (Sidaway, 2000).”
Culture is of exceptional significance in postcolonial societies, in which contradictions between local cultures and colonial influences lead to defining tensions that mark a colonial present: “underlying all (postcolonial) economic, social, and political resistance is the struggle for representation” (McEwan, 2003). Arguably, culture, being a set of predominant attitudes and way of life shared by members of a society (Hofstede, 1997), is by definition organically grown. By logical extension, Americanization can only happen if a society willingly drifts in that direction.
Indeed this is to some extent the case. Layers of historical change and the lived experience of the colonial past have led to the subliminal acceptance of the superiority of the colonial masters and more generally the West. Hence “what is in the west is referred to modernity and progress” (McEwan, 2003). This is the universalizing knowledge produced by neoimperialist power. Hence the propagation of the fast food culture can be seen as an inevitable part in the larger currents the colonial present, not the doing of fast food companies.
And yet this fails to discount my core argument that consumers and cultures are subservient to the fast food culture. Indeed the propagation of the fast food culture is not merely McDonald’s doing, but a larger structural tug by Western influences; this, still, cannot absolve McDonald’s.
We see today’s world order as one shaped by the economic and political clout of the first world, echoing Nietzche’s postmodernist view that the “interpretation that persists at a particular time is a function of power and not truth”. Capitalist paradigms, expounded by Ritzer’s (1998) tenets of McDonaldization (efficiency, control, calculability, predictability), and the hegemonic order of cultures have led to the convergence of cultures towards greater uniformity and the sacrifice of the “unique, personal, communal, spontaneous and free dimensions of human life” (Ram, 2004).
Ritzer (2003a) draw a dichotomy between two extremes of globalization: glocalization (the integration of the global and the local) and grobalization (the global consuming the local). My argument thus far has pointed towards grobalization, but there are also cases where the local survives to some extent. McDonalds offers localized fare, exploiting local culture to its benefit: McKebabs are served in Israel, McVeggie and McCurry Pans in India. Such surviving local flavours, however, seem merely superficial and symbolic, and in fact show how cultural meanings are appropriated for commercial ends. They in no way discount the structural uniformity of the fast food culture.
To some extent Americanized fast food culture creates new cultural space, providing a “surrogate identity for those who do not identify with their own” (Ram, 2004) (hence greater acceptance among youth). On the other hand, the appeal of McDonaldized efficiency has diminished that of slower-paced local cultures; “Attempting to defend traditional cultural forms against cheap consumerism while simultaneously encouraging market forces as the only logical arbiter of human emotion is a losing game” (Ram, 2004). McDonalds has shifted the goalposts of expectations. To compete, traditional food are often forced to McDonaldize i.e. implement the McDonaldization tenets to appeal to consumers (Ritzer, 1997). In Israel, street food like the traditional falafel, once an Israeli tourist symbol have “been rescued from parochialism and upgraded to a world standard-bearer of ‘Israeli fast food’, or as one observer put it, transformed from grub to bread” (Ram, 2004). French cafes have likewise “adopted the fast food formula” (Fantasia, 1995). Varieties of local cultural identities licensed under the uniform structure of global capitalist commercial expansion disguises the unified formula of capital, thereby fostering legitimacy or even sales (Ram, 2004).
McDonalds is not a death knell for local foods, but the McDonaldized culture and structural uniformity that prevails as truth in the age of Western hegemony, easily accepted by the capitalist soul, entails the erosion of old ways of life.
3. PLOTTING MCDONALDS ON URBAN SOCIOCULTURAL LANDSCAPES
Human behaviour is moulded by social forces and relations of production (after: Marx). McDonalds produces, simultaneously, “the objects of consumption and the social subjects to consume them” (Goss, 1993). Let us plot McDonalds on the sociocultural landscapes that it has taken over.
The pricing and ubiquity of McDonalds such that it is accessible to large sections of society has, in a way, made it a mass-market social leveler in most societies (except for the very rich or the very poor). Fast food is seen as a “ubiquitous point of assembly, if not worship” (Stephenson, 1989) simply because it is accessible and acceptable to almost all. In social contexts where fast food joints are the de-facto meeting place, individuals tend to conform to keep up with this norm of reputability (this parallels the conspicuous consumption in Veblen’s 1899 theory of the leisure class).
The power dynamics and ubiquity of McDonalds has led to a distinctive transformation of urban sociocultural landscapes. A geographical sense of place is not irrelevant from this discussion: localities are the totality of social structure and human agency in space – such place includes both the physical ‘real’ conception of urban space and the human ‘imaginary’ construct of consciousness of place. The actions of “mass consumption is among the most powerful and pervasive place-building processes in the world” (Sack, 1988), place it is the expression of cultural symbolism.
Fast food seems universally present across postmodern urban sociocultural landscapes. McDonalds has shaped a distinctive landscape designed to sell its products and “condition an emotional and behavioral response from those whom they see as their malleable customers” (Goss, 1993). Such a landscape is the resultant of the power logics of McDonalds and the fast food culture, and the subservience of consumers and local cultures, as elucidated in the previous sections. As Breen (1993) put it, it is not a personal, private act by the consumer, but a very social act wherein symbolic meanings, social codes and relationships are produced and reproduced. What defines such a landscape?
First, such as landscape is inherently postmodern, where the “perceived dependency on products and their claimed utilities wanes – no object has greater inherent value independent of the symbolic, and the illusionary separations between the real and the simulation dissolve” (Firat, 1995). As argued in section 1, the material utility of McDonalds is irreplaceable; rather, it thrives on the postmodern consumption of images and constituted identity. In many ways (e.g. through the long-standing “happy meal”) McDonalds’ has postured its selling point to be this identity and symbolism, not merely the product itself.
Ritzer (2003) would interpret the ubiquitous distribution of McDonalds (in fast food and in other McDonaldized institutions) as a “fantasy archipelago of consumption islands”, “isolated worlds of enchantment”, to which “there is a kind of magnetism”. Indeed this is best manifested by the 2003 thinly-veiled McDonalds tagline: I’m lovin’ it, where “it” unabashedly refers to the McDonalds lifestyle and culture, not the product per se. At the same time, Ritzer (2003) argues that McDonaldized islands are dead, in that they lead to a dull, boring, and routine form of existence, separated and alienated from the rest of society. Hence his description of the social geography of McDonalds as ‘Islands of the living dead” (2003).
Such imagery hints at the distribution of McDonalds on our postmodern sociocultural landscape, but beneath it lies severe flaws. First, Ritzer did not reconcile the obvious contradiction between McDonaldized islands simultaneously being both of two extremes: living and dead. If these were a thesis-antithesis pair, a synthesis is lacking. Furthermore, Ritzer portrays fast food as islands isolated from the rest of society, neither as part of larger currents in society, nor having any Marxist influence they have on it.
I would see the ubiquitous McDonalds islands of attraction in our sociocultural urbanscape as plums in a pudding – randomly located in the pudding’s deep-seated structural uniformity, embodying the quintessence of the constituted identity of postmodern consumer culture, and at the same time representing the concentration of hegemonic power over consumers and cultures through which such identity and symbolism are carved, yet part of a greater whole and never divorced from the rest of society. This is how I would plot Mcdonalds on the larger sociocultural landscape – Marxist plums in a postmodern pudding.
4. POSSIBLE RECOURSES (INCL. CRITIQUE OF APPROACH)
The critical analysis in this paper may seem to lack rigor, schematic methodology, and hence cannot give any conclusive proof. Postcolonialism operates on many assumptions (that colonial masters treat colonies and shape their society in a particular way, and such influence is long-lasting) that may not be justified. Postmodernism, where anything can be correct, can cut dangerously close to being truistic (e.g. “Mcdonalds creates meaning”).
But such is the nature of anti-positivist discourse. Postmodernism itself acknowledges versions of the truth, none of which is more correct than the other, such that it is futile to prove one as a positivist singular truth. Critique analyzes phenomena’s and illuminates the human condition, offers perspectives and creates constructive discourse. Hence critical analysis serves as a means of self-reflection and the “conscience of society” (Unwin, 1992).
The above discourse on Marxist power dynamics may border on being overly static and deterministic. Structuration (after: Giddens, 1981:27-30) offers an optimistic counterthesis: like Marxism, it accepts power logics as an inevitable fact of life, but argues that the fate of agents is not just the deterministic product of ain imposed structure, but that of a 2-way dialectic in which actors can effect change to the structure. Hence structuration would give greater credit to the agency and power of the consumer, without the violent radicalism of Marx.
Indeed the consumer has several possible recourses to retrieve the commodifed identities and sociocultural space shaped by McDonalds from calculated control: to “expose the fetishism of the commodity and the re-problematization of the relations of consumption” (Goss, 1993). We have seen this in consumer activism, Supersize Me and class action lawsuits being the most seminal examples. Given sufficient momentum, the collective action by a group of actors will force the profit logics of fast food giants to make progressive changes (e.g. McDonalds already publishes nutritional infon and offers salads), brought about by the notion of corporate social responsibility (staying credible to stay profitable).
I therefore conclude that consumers and cultures are subservient but not powerless in the face of the commodifed fast food culture.
The continued popularity and growth of McDonalds in the age of SuperSize Me eludes intuition. It is the result of Mcdonalds’ exploitation of the consumer, and a microcosm of larger narratives in modern consumer society. This case study provides a basis from which to elucidate the power dynamics of consumption. I will analyze various scales of dialectics: (1) individual consumers’ subservience to fast food culture, (2) The Americanized fast food culture and its erosive hegemony over local postcolonial cultures, (3) plotting McDonalds on resultant sociocultural landscapes, and (4) possible recourses, hence showing how consumers and cultures are indeed subservient but not powerless in the face of the commodifed fast food culture.
INTRODUCTION
In the age of Supersize Me, the Class Action Lawsuit, and growing consumer health consciousness, it eludes intuition how McDonald’s maintains its grip on the more than 47 million customers (McDonald’s, 2007) it serves worldwide each day. Americans spend more on fast food than on PCs, cars, and college education (Schlosser, 2002); more than a third of British adults prefer a diet consisting mainly of fast food and beer (Pryer et al, 2001). In the developing world, 2000 McDonalds open each year.
Fast Food joints are reluctant to sell just food – they may go bankrupt – rather, they shove “extra value meals” of digestive and emotional gratification down the throats of unwitting consumers, carefully-engineered to program the consumer to come back for more. How does the fast food industry pull this off?
1. THE INDIVIDUAL CONSUMER’S SUBSERVIENCE TO FAST FOOD
Capitalism is widely perceived to be the dehumanizing antithesis of aesthetic interests, and yet, one defining feature of contemporary mature capitalism is the “convergence of the economic and the cultural” (Scott, 2000), where “cultural meanings are regularly appropriated for commercial ends, and human agency subordinated to the logic of capital” (Jackson, 2002). An emphasis on meaning, identity and representation does not trump the continued capitalistic salience of the economy.
Fast food is one instance of a commodified symbolic form (after Scott, 2000), where ‘commodifed’ in the Marxian sense denotes goods and services produced for capitalist profit, and ‘symbolic form’ denotes goods with significant emotional content. McDonalds is not in the business of selling food, more importantly; they sell customers the desire to consume their food. The means and relations of production have been revolutionized, such that fast food is masked in the materiality of the commodity (after Marx: commodity fetish) - i.e. severed from the social and spatial relations that structure its productions (Goss, 1993), and given artificial and hollow meanings and social place. This meaning and place is the construct of the mammoth fast food industry, and in its face consumers are subservient “passive and vulnerable victims of the force field which they don’t understand” (Goss, 1993), such that find food wrapped in McDonald’s wrappers better tasting than identical samples in generic wrappers (Robinson, 2007). I shall now elucidate the meaning and place of fast food, and how it is constructed.
For instance, consider how McDonalds takes pride in being ‘fast’ food, an inherently quick and easy food concept because little forward planning, waiting, or clearing up is required. While time poverty is the product of the post-modern capitalist sociocultural milleu, and not fast food per se, the Fast Food industry “understands, profit from, and encourages an occupation with haste” (Gleick, 1999). McDonalds relentlessly emphasizes its speed: it once gave out free apple pies if food was not ready in 60 seconds; advertisements have drawn parallels between Tennis champion Ivanisevic’s serve (216kph) and McDonalds quick burger assembly. With relentless subliminal messaging, McDonald’s (together with the rest of capitalist society) subtly imposes on consumers the perceived threat that time is in chronically short supply, Brewis (2005) concludes that “many of us could therefore be seen as cultural slaves to M-time – we lose a more organic and rhythmic sense of time as the natural context of life”.
Similarly, fast food branding tends to juxtapose vivid, recognizable symbols (e.g. the golden arches, Ronald McDonald, the burger) alongside the corporate images McDonalds’ seeks to portray: themes of youthful exuberance or being ‘cool’, healthy lifestyles, sheer enjoyment (e.g. smiles on children’s’ faces upon getting a Happy meal), and friendship (e.g. KFC’s buddy meal). (Also note caption on page 2). McDonalds creates lifestyle and culture built around it, shaping and exploiting the sociocultural landscape for profit (this will further discussed in part 3)
There are multiplicities of forces working against McDonalds: health concerns (championed by Supersize Me), the frequent consumer’s gastronomic boredom, and the “high-cultural disdain for conspicuous mass-consumption resulting from the legacy of a puritanical fear of the moral corruption inherent in commercialism and materialism” (Goss, 1993). I extend Goss (1993)’s argument against the fear of conspicuous con-sumption in shopping malls to address fast food: McDonalds assuages this collective fear and guilt over the evils of fast food by designing a fantasized disassociation from the act of consumption (i.e. you consume the lifestyle, not the burger) to distract consumers from the emptiness of the burger.
The sheer irony of fast food being promoted as ‘healthy’, and what was cheap American street food being divorced from its history and rebranded as ‘trendy’ expounds the muscle of the fast food industry holds over consumer perceptions. The caucus locus is the social power relations of production and consumption (Sack, 1988) – the capital and the brainpower of fast food giants acting from young on the individual mind, subordinating the individual to the postmodernist “consumption of artificial and hollow signs over and above material utilities” (Baudrillard, 1981). The world is not merely represented in commodifed images, but consists of such images – the image having more substantive effect than reality (Baudrillard, 1993). It’s all a lie – one that allows McDonalds to sidestep its replaceable material utility to create an irreplaceable image consumers flock towards.
The realist view sidesteps this to state that perception does not matter, because “a real world independent of human perception” exists (Unwin, 1992). And yet the consumer’s ‘choice’ – or lack thereof – whether or not to step into McDonalds is predicated upon perception and not higher ‘truths’ that are not privy to their decision making, even if such ‘truths’ exist.
This view may seem overly deterministic; power play and presiding influences restricting the field of human agency being restricted does not prove that this agency is itself dead. We may argue that it is ultimately the consumer’s sovereign choice to step into McDonalds.
Consider, however, how “consumption undoes contexts to create contexts, undoes social relation to create social relations, and undoes meaning to create meaning” (Sack, 1988). Whether or not truth is relative, in a world where interpretations are relative, such that the “interpretation that persists at a particular time is a function of power and not truth” (Nietzsche), we see the contexts and meanings of consumption being engineered by those at the profiteering end of consumption, such that the agency of the consumer exists only within the boundaries drawn by the mammoth industry; consumer sovereignty over the consumption of the irreplaceable images and identities constituted by McDonalds is not dead, but it is a limited and elusive ideal.
2. THE AMERICANIZED FAST FOOD CULTURE AND ITS EROSIVE HEGEMONY OVER LOCAL POSTCOLONIAL CULTURES
The global McDonalds presence is not just a product of post-Fordist economic globalization, but one of cultural globalization (Americanization); the exportation of fast food is not only that of commodity but also that of culture and lifestyle. Such a culture, of course, promotes consumption and hence profits.
In this section I shall focus on postcolonial societies. In contrast with other colonial powers, such societies bear little native commonality with American culture and hence exhibit marked cultural change. I deliberately exclude societies like China, as such societies were subject to imperial power but not formal colonies, and “the colonial epoch is not the defining feature of societies with longer historical trajectories. (Sidaway, 2000).”
Culture is of exceptional significance in postcolonial societies, in which contradictions between local cultures and colonial influences lead to defining tensions that mark a colonial present: “underlying all (postcolonial) economic, social, and political resistance is the struggle for representation” (McEwan, 2003). Arguably, culture, being a set of predominant attitudes and way of life shared by members of a society (Hofstede, 1997), is by definition organically grown. By logical extension, Americanization can only happen if a society willingly drifts in that direction.
Indeed this is to some extent the case. Layers of historical change and the lived experience of the colonial past have led to the subliminal acceptance of the superiority of the colonial masters and more generally the West. Hence “what is in the west is referred to modernity and progress” (McEwan, 2003). This is the universalizing knowledge produced by neoimperialist power. Hence the propagation of the fast food culture can be seen as an inevitable part in the larger currents the colonial present, not the doing of fast food companies.
And yet this fails to discount my core argument that consumers and cultures are subservient to the fast food culture. Indeed the propagation of the fast food culture is not merely McDonald’s doing, but a larger structural tug by Western influences; this, still, cannot absolve McDonald’s.
We see today’s world order as one shaped by the economic and political clout of the first world, echoing Nietzche’s postmodernist view that the “interpretation that persists at a particular time is a function of power and not truth”. Capitalist paradigms, expounded by Ritzer’s (1998) tenets of McDonaldization (efficiency, control, calculability, predictability), and the hegemonic order of cultures have led to the convergence of cultures towards greater uniformity and the sacrifice of the “unique, personal, communal, spontaneous and free dimensions of human life” (Ram, 2004).
Ritzer (2003a) draw a dichotomy between two extremes of globalization: glocalization (the integration of the global and the local) and grobalization (the global consuming the local). My argument thus far has pointed towards grobalization, but there are also cases where the local survives to some extent. McDonalds offers localized fare, exploiting local culture to its benefit: McKebabs are served in Israel, McVeggie and McCurry Pans in India. Such surviving local flavours, however, seem merely superficial and symbolic, and in fact show how cultural meanings are appropriated for commercial ends. They in no way discount the structural uniformity of the fast food culture.
To some extent Americanized fast food culture creates new cultural space, providing a “surrogate identity for those who do not identify with their own” (Ram, 2004) (hence greater acceptance among youth). On the other hand, the appeal of McDonaldized efficiency has diminished that of slower-paced local cultures; “Attempting to defend traditional cultural forms against cheap consumerism while simultaneously encouraging market forces as the only logical arbiter of human emotion is a losing game” (Ram, 2004). McDonalds has shifted the goalposts of expectations. To compete, traditional food are often forced to McDonaldize i.e. implement the McDonaldization tenets to appeal to consumers (Ritzer, 1997). In Israel, street food like the traditional falafel, once an Israeli tourist symbol have “been rescued from parochialism and upgraded to a world standard-bearer of ‘Israeli fast food’, or as one observer put it, transformed from grub to bread” (Ram, 2004). French cafes have likewise “adopted the fast food formula” (Fantasia, 1995). Varieties of local cultural identities licensed under the uniform structure of global capitalist commercial expansion disguises the unified formula of capital, thereby fostering legitimacy or even sales (Ram, 2004).
McDonalds is not a death knell for local foods, but the McDonaldized culture and structural uniformity that prevails as truth in the age of Western hegemony, easily accepted by the capitalist soul, entails the erosion of old ways of life.
3. PLOTTING MCDONALDS ON URBAN SOCIOCULTURAL LANDSCAPES
Human behaviour is moulded by social forces and relations of production (after: Marx). McDonalds produces, simultaneously, “the objects of consumption and the social subjects to consume them” (Goss, 1993). Let us plot McDonalds on the sociocultural landscapes that it has taken over.
The pricing and ubiquity of McDonalds such that it is accessible to large sections of society has, in a way, made it a mass-market social leveler in most societies (except for the very rich or the very poor). Fast food is seen as a “ubiquitous point of assembly, if not worship” (Stephenson, 1989) simply because it is accessible and acceptable to almost all. In social contexts where fast food joints are the de-facto meeting place, individuals tend to conform to keep up with this norm of reputability (this parallels the conspicuous consumption in Veblen’s 1899 theory of the leisure class).
The power dynamics and ubiquity of McDonalds has led to a distinctive transformation of urban sociocultural landscapes. A geographical sense of place is not irrelevant from this discussion: localities are the totality of social structure and human agency in space – such place includes both the physical ‘real’ conception of urban space and the human ‘imaginary’ construct of consciousness of place. The actions of “mass consumption is among the most powerful and pervasive place-building processes in the world” (Sack, 1988), place it is the expression of cultural symbolism.
Fast food seems universally present across postmodern urban sociocultural landscapes. McDonalds has shaped a distinctive landscape designed to sell its products and “condition an emotional and behavioral response from those whom they see as their malleable customers” (Goss, 1993). Such a landscape is the resultant of the power logics of McDonalds and the fast food culture, and the subservience of consumers and local cultures, as elucidated in the previous sections. As Breen (1993) put it, it is not a personal, private act by the consumer, but a very social act wherein symbolic meanings, social codes and relationships are produced and reproduced. What defines such a landscape?
First, such as landscape is inherently postmodern, where the “perceived dependency on products and their claimed utilities wanes – no object has greater inherent value independent of the symbolic, and the illusionary separations between the real and the simulation dissolve” (Firat, 1995). As argued in section 1, the material utility of McDonalds is irreplaceable; rather, it thrives on the postmodern consumption of images and constituted identity. In many ways (e.g. through the long-standing “happy meal”) McDonalds’ has postured its selling point to be this identity and symbolism, not merely the product itself.
Ritzer (2003) would interpret the ubiquitous distribution of McDonalds (in fast food and in other McDonaldized institutions) as a “fantasy archipelago of consumption islands”, “isolated worlds of enchantment”, to which “there is a kind of magnetism”. Indeed this is best manifested by the 2003 thinly-veiled McDonalds tagline: I’m lovin’ it, where “it” unabashedly refers to the McDonalds lifestyle and culture, not the product per se. At the same time, Ritzer (2003) argues that McDonaldized islands are dead, in that they lead to a dull, boring, and routine form of existence, separated and alienated from the rest of society. Hence his description of the social geography of McDonalds as ‘Islands of the living dead” (2003).
Such imagery hints at the distribution of McDonalds on our postmodern sociocultural landscape, but beneath it lies severe flaws. First, Ritzer did not reconcile the obvious contradiction between McDonaldized islands simultaneously being both of two extremes: living and dead. If these were a thesis-antithesis pair, a synthesis is lacking. Furthermore, Ritzer portrays fast food as islands isolated from the rest of society, neither as part of larger currents in society, nor having any Marxist influence they have on it.
I would see the ubiquitous McDonalds islands of attraction in our sociocultural urbanscape as plums in a pudding – randomly located in the pudding’s deep-seated structural uniformity, embodying the quintessence of the constituted identity of postmodern consumer culture, and at the same time representing the concentration of hegemonic power over consumers and cultures through which such identity and symbolism are carved, yet part of a greater whole and never divorced from the rest of society. This is how I would plot Mcdonalds on the larger sociocultural landscape – Marxist plums in a postmodern pudding.
4. POSSIBLE RECOURSES (INCL. CRITIQUE OF APPROACH)
The critical analysis in this paper may seem to lack rigor, schematic methodology, and hence cannot give any conclusive proof. Postcolonialism operates on many assumptions (that colonial masters treat colonies and shape their society in a particular way, and such influence is long-lasting) that may not be justified. Postmodernism, where anything can be correct, can cut dangerously close to being truistic (e.g. “Mcdonalds creates meaning”).
But such is the nature of anti-positivist discourse. Postmodernism itself acknowledges versions of the truth, none of which is more correct than the other, such that it is futile to prove one as a positivist singular truth. Critique analyzes phenomena’s and illuminates the human condition, offers perspectives and creates constructive discourse. Hence critical analysis serves as a means of self-reflection and the “conscience of society” (Unwin, 1992).
The above discourse on Marxist power dynamics may border on being overly static and deterministic. Structuration (after: Giddens, 1981:27-30) offers an optimistic counterthesis: like Marxism, it accepts power logics as an inevitable fact of life, but argues that the fate of agents is not just the deterministic product of ain imposed structure, but that of a 2-way dialectic in which actors can effect change to the structure. Hence structuration would give greater credit to the agency and power of the consumer, without the violent radicalism of Marx.
Indeed the consumer has several possible recourses to retrieve the commodifed identities and sociocultural space shaped by McDonalds from calculated control: to “expose the fetishism of the commodity and the re-problematization of the relations of consumption” (Goss, 1993). We have seen this in consumer activism, Supersize Me and class action lawsuits being the most seminal examples. Given sufficient momentum, the collective action by a group of actors will force the profit logics of fast food giants to make progressive changes (e.g. McDonalds already publishes nutritional infon and offers salads), brought about by the notion of corporate social responsibility (staying credible to stay profitable).
I therefore conclude that consumers and cultures are subservient but not powerless in the face of the commodifed fast food culture.
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