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Consumers who simultaneously produce and consume, especially prevalent in digital environments where users perform unpaid labor.
2 chapters across 1 book
Chapter 7 The Irrationality of Rationality: Traffic Jams on Those “Happy Trails”Chapter 7 of The McDonaldization of Society: Into the Digital Age explores the irrational consequences of rational systems, particularly focusing on how McDonaldization manifests inefficiencies, dehumanization, and homogenization in both brick-and-mortar and digital contexts. The chapter highlights the shift of McDonaldization's center from physical fast-food restaurants to digital platforms like Amazon.com, emphasizing the role of big data, prosumers, and the blending of physical and digital consumption spaces. It also discusses the need to update the McDonaldization thesis to address these digital realities while acknowledging the persistence of irrationalities within rationalized systems.
Chapter 2 dealt, in part, with the organizations and systems that were precursors to, as well as the earliest manifestations of, the process of McDonaldization. As we saw, the early forms include bureaucracies, industrial organizations, the assembly-line, and, of course, fast-food restaurants. Chapter 2 also dealt, in part, with a new largely online world—most notably on Amazon.com—where McDonaldization has reached new heights. Needless to say, people exist in and on these settings. It is the norm to distinguish between two types of people in, or on, these settings: consumers (or customers, clients) and producers (or workers). However, it is important to note that people as exclusively producers are of declining importance in material sites and virtually nonexistent on digital sites. In discussing the platform economy (see Chapter 2), which supports digital consumption sites, Herrman describes them as “employee-light.” 1 For example, while Amazon.com employs about 14 workers for every $10 million in revenue generated, brick-and-mortar retailers require almost 50 workers to generate the same amount of revenue.2 Uber and Airbnb do not employ drivers (Uber sees them as “independent contractors” lacking the rights of employees, e.g., for overtime) and homeowners; they are on their own in exchange for a percentage of the income derived from the services they offer. In Airbnb’s case, homeowners get the lion’s share of the income. They pay Airbnb a 3% fee, while guests pay the company a 6% to 12% fee. In the case of Uber, drivers usually get between 15% and 25% of the fare. However, these companies do employ people to manage these systems; Uber, with revenue of nearly $11 billion, has only about 7,000 employees.Chapter 2 explores the evolution and intensification of McDonaldization in both traditional and digital contexts, highlighting the shift from traditional producers to a platform economy characterized by 'employee-light' and 'asset-light' models, exemplified by companies like Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb. It discusses the declining role of exclusively paid workers, the rise of prosumers who both produce and consume, and focuses on two dimensions of McDonaldization—efficiency and calculability—emphasizing how efficiency drives faster service and reduced human labor, often at the cost of worker security and increased exploitation.