McDonaldization

McDonald’s is one of the emblems of the bogeyman, globalization. In an essay on McDonald’s in Moscow, Melissa L. Caldwell complicates this picture in a number of ways. In a number of ways, “McDonald’s has been more fully domesticated” and thus has “lost its distinctiveness as something alien and visible and has instead become part of everyday life.” She reports that teenage Russians now identify “McDonald’s hamburgers” as a traditional Russian food, since it is so much a part of their world; by contrast, she describes older Russians making home-made “hamburgers” of fried cabbage and bread.

McDonald’s is treated as a kind of shelter by homeless Russians, whom Caldwell has observed “using the bathrooms to bathe themselves and to wash their clothes and dishes.” They don’t have to sneak past the manager either: “Street children also find the restaurants to be safe havens. The store managers of a central Moscow McDonald’s allow these children to sit at the tables and eat food that has been left on diners’ trays.” This is a very Russian fast food experience.

McDonald’s has come to play the role that pubs play in England, a public living room where friends, relatives, and colleagues gather for an evening. Coffee shops are “impersonal and generic settings” for Russians, but “they continue to approach McDonald’s as a trusted social space where they gather with friends and relax.”

This is not exactly McDonaldization; it’s the Russification of McDonald’s, an example of what some sociologists have taken to called “glocalization.”