Ritzer’s Reach: Timely Reflections on a Global Sociological Legacy
Thesis Eleven Managing Editor Howard Prosser interviews J. Michael Ryan, Guest Editor of the current special issue: Celebrating George Ritzer: Essays in honor of a sociological visionary
HP How did the idea for this festschrift on George Ritzer take shape? What drew you to do it now?
JMR I have worked with George since 2002, so for nearly a quarter of a century now. During that time, he has been my professor, my mentor, my advisor, my co-teacher, my co-author, my co-editor, and, most importantly, my friend. This Festschrift was inspired by a number of reasons including testimony to George’s global influence, my own involvement in taking the lead on some of his most landmark works, and the timeliness of his (almost) retirement and anniversary of his landmark work on McDonaldization.
My own career has led to academic positions in multiple countries (and languages) across five continents. In addition to positions held, I have also had interviews, given talks, and attended conferences in dozens of countries around the world. There were few, if any, of those where George’s name, work, or influence was not immediately present. The sales, citations, and translations of his work speak to his global influence, but it has been the heartfelt way in which others have mentioned that influence that most inspired this Festschrift.
In organizing this Festschrift, identifying contributors was both easy and difficult: George has influenced countless people across the globe, his name appearing on hundreds of thousands of bookshelves, making it impossible to include everyone and prompting both apologies to those absent as well as gratitude to those who participated. Determining the structure of the volume posed another challenge, as George’s extensive and varied work resists neat categorization; ultimately, his contributions were “simplified” into four broad themes – teaching and mentorship, theory, McDonaldization, and consumption and presumption – an administrative necessity rather than an accurate reflection of the true interconnected nature of his scholarship. These divisions are far from rigid, since George’s work defies confinement, and many contributions (and contributors) placed in one category that could just as easily have been placed in another. Collectively, the hope is that these contributions pay some level of tribute to the breadth, depth, and significant impact of George’s academic career.
Building on the note of heartfelt influence, George’s work has quite clearly been at the center of my own academic inspirations. While the nuance of my interests has deviated from George’s in many ways (my own work has centered, in part, more on issues related to genders and sexualities, health inequalities, and survey construction), the core of my interests (making the ivory tower accessible, inspiring future generations) has been heavily inspired by George. To that end, and to my great honor, I have joined George in recent years in co-authoring and co-editing updates to some of his more landmark works (The McDonaldization of Society, 11th edition; Introduction to Sociology, 6th edition; The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2nd edition).
Perhaps the most immediate inspiration for this Festschrift was George’s impending retirement. After more than 50+ years toiling in, leading, and inspiring the discipline of sociology (among others), George is finally slowing down a bit to enjoy his retirement years (well deserved for someone halfway through their eighth decade). While I hope that George outlives us all, I felt it important to bring this Festschrift to light in time for George to be able to bask in it. Most simply, he deserves it.
HP Ritzer’s ideas have been part of the sociological conversation for a long time. What is it about his work that still speaks to you and to readers today?
JMR George’s work is both timely and timeless. He has been, and continues to be, a sort of social seer, someone who is able to both see what is seemingly most relevant in the contemporary moment, but also that which is likely to remain impactful in the future. He not only sees what is worthy of critical analysis today, but also what is likely to be critical to analyze tomorrow.
George’s work still speaks to me, and hopefully to many of us, because it captures, to paraphrase Marxian terminology, not just the superstructure of epiphenomena, but also the base of social transformations. McDonaldization is nearly universally applicable; globalization has trumped globalization as a term to understand contemporary global processes; and “nothing” certainly best defines a world dominated by seconds-long videos on social media and the empty responses largely generated by AI.
George’s work has become almost taken for granted. McDonaldization, as a text, is now adopted less frequently in classrooms as a supplementary text exactly because it is now largely seen as a foundational concept (at least in sociology). One might argue (as I would) that the mark of a successful contribution to social understanding is that it makes the “obvious”, obvious. In other words, that it exposes the most crucial underlying aspects of social phenomena to the point that they are no longer “under”, but rather laid visible, intelligible, and nearly “assumed”. In this case, taken for granted is a mark of success.
HP Why did Thesis Eleven feel like the natural home for this issue?
JMR Both Thesis Eleven and George’s body of work share a deep concern with the nature of modernity, the dynamics of rationalization, and the global transformations that define contemporary life. The grounded intellectual conversation that Thesis Eleven has cultivated for more than four decades seemed a natural outlet for the kind of critical reflection and interdisciplinary dialogue that a Festschrift in George’s honor would invite.
Thesis Eleven has positioned itself as a forum for critical theory and historical sociology, exploring the diverse traditions that have grappled with the promises and contradictions of modernity. Its pages have carried contributions from major theorists working in the lineages of Weber, Habermas, and Castoriadis, among others, as it has sought to connect theoretical traditions largely grounded in Europe with global and postcolonial perspectives and lived realities. In this sense, Thesis Eleven shares with Ritzer a commitment to thinking about the “innovations” of modernity as both a global condition as well as a complex set of institutional and cultural transformations that flow between the macro and micro levels of social understanding.
George’s own sociological imagination moves between sociology, social theory, philosophy, economics, politics, and cultural studies, always asking how the theoretical structures of social organization impact the lived realities of everyday experiences. This orientation resonates directly with Thesis Eleven’s editorial emphasis on bridging theoretical and empirical inquiry, and on maintaining a critical dialogue between the ivory tower and actually embodied lived experiences.
Thesis Eleven’s own history also reinforced the sense that it would be an appropriate venue for such a commemorative volume. It has regularly devoted space to honoring major theorists (including Festschrifts honoring Peter Beilharz and Maria Markus and pieces honoring the oeuvre of Zygmunt Bauman) and theoretical traditions. Most notably, a review symposium of George’s work The Globalization of Nothing already appeared in 2003. Indeed, citations to George’s work have been regular, and recurring, in the pages of this journal.
In short, Thesis Eleven and George Ritzer share a distinctive intellectual sensibility: both are concerned with the contradictions of modernity, the processes of rationalization and globalization, and the need for a critical, historically informed social theory. Thesis Eleven was not only the most obvious choice for a Festschrift honoring George, it also provides a symbiosis of the theoretical conversation that both have been inspiring for decades.
HP When you think about Ritzer’s legacy, what do you think it offers to the next generation of sociologists?
JMR George’s intellectual legacy offers the next generation of sociologists a powerful set of conceptual tools and a compelling model for how to think critically about modernity in an increasingly globalized, and homogenized, world. His work stands as a bridge between intellectual social theory and the lived contemporary realities of consumer culture, digital capitalism, and increasing global homogenization. George’s legacy is not just a series of influential concepts – metatheory, McDonaldization, the globalization of nothing, prosumption – but, more importantly, a distinctive mode of sociological imagination that insists on connecting the everyday with the systemic, the theoretical with the experiential, and the local (or, glocal, as George would prefer) with the global.
Above all, and perhaps ironically to its seeming message, George’s work offers hope. While building on the pessimistic work of Weber, George’s work adds in just enough of Marx’s ultimate (potential) optimism to make it both useful and inspiring. The world is indeed doomed to a future of increasing McDonaldization…unless we wake up to what is happening and make conscious, collective efforts to change it. Whereas Weber saw the cage we are increasingly trapped in composed of bars of iron, George sees the possibility, however slim, that those bars might yet be rubber (and a recognition that they might also just be velvet). In sum, George’s work offers us a way to critique society (which seems increasingly easy to do these days), highlight the underlying causes of its seemingly disparate effects, and yet still potential doors to escape the “impending” realities.
The above said, George’s work rarely provides clear solutions. And while that much of his work is decidedly Weberian, his unflapping, if sometimes deeply hidden, hope for a better future, is decidedly Marxian. Similarly, like Marx, George does little to provide recipes for the kitchens of our future. Instead, he does what I personally consider to be even more important: he shows the problems, provides us tools for understanding them, and then leaves it to us to find solutions for ourselves. Rather than a critique, this is high praise. To paraphrase biblical references, he does not give his readers fish, but rather shows them how to fish, how to understand what fishing is, and, perhaps most importantly, how to find ways to expand their pescatarian diet.
George’s legacy also lies in the inspiration he has given to many generations of sociologists (myself included). Whether it has been directly through his teaching and mentorship, or indirectly through his scholarship, George has inspired multiple generations of sociologists. As I note in my own tribute, I believe this has been accomplished most prominently through his skill as a “translator”, that is, someone who can take highfalutin academic ideas and writing and make them accessible (and interesting!) to the masses. Perhaps George’s greatest legacy is that he, perhaps more than any other sociologist to date, has made sociology accessible.
In sum, George’s work embodies a moral and reflexive approach to the social world. His analyses of efficiency, control by nonhuman technology, and dehumanization carry an implicit ethical warning about the consequences of rationalized systems for human creativity, autonomy, and meaning that has perhaps never been quite so relevant as it is today. For the next generation, and particularly in times of increasing attacks on science, logic, and education combined with an increasing reliance on the unreliable systems of artificial intelligence, this critical orientation remains essential; it calls on sociologists to question the taken-for-granted logics of modern institutions, to recognize the costs and risks associated with so-called progress, and to imagine more humane alternative futures and possibilities.
thesis eleven 