Since its formulation, the McDonaldization thesis has triggered a world-wide intellectual debate and inspired a huge volume of research and publications – both are still in full swing and far from completion. In the course of years, the metaphor of McDonald stratagem of anticipatory control of human behaviour has been successfully deployed (not the least by George Ritzer himself) in rendering intelligible a wide variety of social fields, far beyond the food-serving/eating habits in the fast globalizing world. The reviewed study offers a ‘career report’ of these developments, and given the fertility of the original thesis which inspired them, the book will be certainly widely welcomed both as a much needed summary of the findings thus far and a highly helpful guide for future research.

There is much new in this successive exercise in widening the application scope of the ‘McDonaldization’ methaphor. The incisive analyses of ‘McSociology’, ‘McJobs’, ‘McUniversities’ and ‘McTourism’, in which prescripting of conduct are increasingly on offer but also increasingly sought after, are particularly eye-opening – but the message conveyed consistently throughout the text is that the difference between ‘shopping and non- shopping’ areas and pastime is getting more blurred by the day and for many practical purposes has been already obliterated. In addition, Ritzer ties together the previously separate strands in his research, exploring intimate links between the spread of the McDonald-style consumption and the spectacular success of credit card shopping. Last but not least, he offers a thorough overhaul of the inherited notions of ‘rationality’ and ‘rationalization’, bringing back from a near-oblivion Karl Mannheim’s alternative to Max Weber’s vision of the rationalization tendency. All in all, this updating further demonstrates the enormous cognitive potential of the McDonaldization metaphor and would certainly enhance the well deserved interest it has attracted in the last decade.

Missing now, as before, from Ritzer’s widely ramified analysis is an insight into the deeper social/political reasons of the breath-taking pace and amazing success of the McDonaldization processes. As it were, the cultural transformation Ritzer reveals and records is not just an effect of a clever business formula; there must have been a fertile soil for the seed, once sown, to grow so quickly – resonance (indeed, a degree of mutual adequacy) between the changes in the existential conditions of postmodern individuals and the escape-from-uncertainty-through-designed-standards which ‘McDonaldization is all about. One can hope that having completed the detailed description of ‘McDonaldization’ as a principal driving force of consumer society, Ritzer will proceed to the exploration of the fateful departures in socially produced life conditions that made it work.