Golden Arches

Advertising has become the cornerstone of many Fortune 500 companies like PepsiCo, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Microsoft, Apple, and McDonald’s to name a few. The average person may be exposed to as many as 5000 ads a day, compared to the meager 500 back in the 70s (“Cutting Through Advertising Clutter” CBS.com).  Just about everything we see is branded with some sort of logo. This past week I noticed that I was being barraged by numerous McDonald’s commercials. One specific commercial stood out to me due to its focus on children peering into the “old school” McDonald’s happy meal boxes. One kid says that they don’t see anything and that “it” isn’t in the box. At the end of the commercial an adult comes on and says that hope is in every box. Going on further that McDonald’s donates a portion of the proceeds to Ronald McDonald House of Charities, just as Wal-Mart does get charity work also. Somehow the fact that these companies rely on unskilled labor, paying little in wages and zero benefits doesn’t sound as good on a commercial as “hope” does.

The McDonald’s corporation has become a prominent feature of our everyday lives. In my immediate neighborhood there are two restaurants about a mile and half apart. Lots of children have memories that include the company’s characters, play areas, and especially their toys. McDonald’s has been in business since 1955 and currently serves 60 million customers a day. They have over 32,000 restaurants in 100 countries (McDonalds.com). The Asia-Pacific, Middle East, Africa (APMEA) region has 7,555 stores (Veseth 2006). McDonald’s has donated $40 million in scholarships since 1985 and continues to donate a portion of its profits to the Ronald McDonald House of Charities and other local charities. Franchise owners often donate to their local communities. For example, one franchise owner in Pennsylvania sent 15 community youths to college. The larger question I suppose is not how much good does McDonald’s do for the plentiful communities it serves, but what impact has it had on the American culture and its pervasiveness into other cultures, shaping it. McDonald’s has successfully created an image of help, hope, and children, and in return the public continuously and conveniently “overlooks” their exploitation and ideologies of consumerism and unhealthy eating (plaguing the most poorest socioeconomic classes with obesity). But don’t forget that McDonald’s supports the “working guy” with the Dollar menu, because that billion dollar CEO cares about YOUR plights.

McDonald’s standardization that consisted of speed, consistency, and low price help the company rise through the ranks to become 106^th of the top companies (CNNMoney.com). The company successfully applied Adam Smith’s division of labor, successfully taking and filling an order in 30 seconds or less. Through the diversification  of tasks and the reduction of “wasted or excess” time, you are able to get your food in minutes, maybe even seconds; as if waiting was so horrible. Unfortunately this traps us in Weber’s Iron Cage that is based upon efficiency, calculability, predictability, and of course, control. All this indifference leaves little room for creativity and personality. The employee is forced into competition and is alienated from the hundreds of burgers they make, making it “just a job.” Only through the employee’s exploitation is the franchise owners and the McDonald’s corporation able to make the millions to donate to their own charity and send the 3, yes 3, scholarships winners of last years’ competitors to college.

Fast capitalism has caused our communities and families to be sped up, blurring the line between the public and the private. Everything has been intensified making our lives a multitasking nightmare were moms discuss their children on the phone while driving to work.  We surf the web while texting and cooking dinner. Children spend unlimited hours completing mundane and “resume building” tasks in efforts to prepare themselves for the employment world. With all of the tests on performativity, is it any surprise that there is a breakdown in interpersonal communication and healthy relationships. McDonald’s has also created a summer camp that seeks to educate and groom the youth for employment.

McDonald’s has also taken commodification to an all new level, turning “hope” into something that can be bought or provided through lots of money. This has also framed their products as a way to “help” others in its efforts to raise its profit margin. Our species being (Karl Marx) has been linked to consumerism; if you want to feel connected to humanity and the self you must buy happy meals and Big Macs. It is not as farfetched as you may think; McDonald’s sales 5,000 Big Macs on an average day. On McHappy Day, Brazil raised $7.8 million from Big Mac sales in one day (rmhc.org). Everything has become a commodity in a world fueled by exploitation.

McDonald’s best represents a globalization that is standardizing our lives, in which we focus on controlling and maximizing our profits. To many other countries, McDonald’s represents American values of overconsumption, violence, sex, and domination. Even though thousands of people purchase their products and use their facilities for various reasons, it does not mean that they welcome the American culture that has the potential to disrupt their cultural values on family, relationships, consumption, work, and education. The world is filled with many good intentions that subliminally socialize people to believe in what the all mighty dollar can do instead of what the individual can create. It is important to remember while criticizing companies like McDonald’s that placing the blame solely on the company denies the individual agency; the individual is still very active in the process.

The Early Bird Gets the Worm!

After reading “Fast Families, Virtual Children” by Ben Agger and Beth Anne Shelton,I was in front of the boob tube watching some random television show, probably one about how some wealthy people survive their rough realities, and all of the sudden a commercial about learning appeared. It was the “summer” commercial for Sylvan Learning. It stated that over the extremely lengthy 2 months of vacation, children will lose all of the information they learned throughout the school year. This statement was paired with, I would say, a ten year old boy getting out of a pool knocking the “knowledge” out of his head; as if it were even possible. It then continued on, explaining that their service could increase a child’s reading level in 36 hours of their instruction. It was a sure-fire way to boost your child’s performance. It ended with a child happily learning, still in a chair taking instruction in a room with books, bland walls, no sun light; with each blink a little more creativity and vivacity lost.

I’m sure we can all relate to the fact that this doesn’t happen. Even though we might forget a random fact or statistical information or definition, skills are never lost and if raw data is your focus then maybe we all forget things here and there. The real question is what is lost in a world where children are sentenced to 6+ exhausting, mentally and physically, hours of learning. Children, nor adults, are made to be sedentary creatures, so locking either in a room and forcing them to be immobile is impractical and unreasonable. As we age, we envy children for many things like their youth, creativity, innocence, and time. Due to adult’s inability to have these, children are resented. With a mix of capitalism this turns into efforts for year-round schooling, ending recess, and increased standardized testing and extracurricular activities. We make the ten year old's life just as exhausting as someone in college. Agger and Shelton make a great point that “[t]he triumph of facts over theories already decides in favor of culture’s utilitarianism” (p.142). With things like recess and summer breaks deemed as useless, there is a push to cut them out because they are not viewed as productive.

Any sane person would question the need to be productive all the time. In today’s economic climate, time is money and “free” time does not turn into career opportunities. We often hear that it is not what you know but who you know. This language transforms every action into a business interaction; cultural capital equates to economic capital. We teach our children to take tests not to enhance their abilities, to reproduce what they’ve been taught not to enhance their analytical skills to challenge their own perceptions and ideas; ultimately we encourage docile bodies and “good” workers.

Adulthood is being performed and produced earlier and earlier in children, hence educational enhancers like “My Baby Can Read.” This amazing program helps your baby read as early as 9 months! In this plan your child can have a college reading level by age ten, what more could you want. Instead of learning some social skills, you stuff them in a corner, only letting them out for their 8 resume building activities. Television programs like Barney & Friends and Dora the Explorer socialize children at an early age the rules of world and another language; don’t forget being bilingual is key. This “worldly self,” concept presented by Agger and Shelton, posits that the manufacturing line for adulthood begins before kindergarten.

What kind of culture and people are we creating when personal happiness and success falls upon performativity? When we calculate a GPA out to the seventh decimal point we are smashing the vase of creativity by reinforcing certain skill sets, skill sets that benefit a world of consumerism, productivity, stereotyping, gender roles, majorities versus minorities, and most importantly socioeconomic status. As a society we become purely workers with limited abilities when we stamp out anything that is not deemed profitable.

How the Sociological Imagination Affected My Life

As a returning student at the age of 24, I was unsure what I wanted to “do” with my education. I was much more aware of what I didn’t want to do than what I did. I didn’t want to keep working dead end service jobs and feeling like I was swimming against a tide that pushed me further away being the person I wanted to be. I didn’t see any way to get out and felt like I had no one to blame for my circumstances but myself. At 20 I knew I should have gone to college and could see I was getting nowhere fast. I wondered why I couldn’t break out of fast food and into the retail section, other people had and what was wrong with me that I was forced to work fast food jobs? I wondered why I couldn’t get hired to use the office skills I had gone to trade school for. I blamed myself and tried to imagine what I could have done differently and better to increase my chances of getting a better job. I felt that I had only one option –college but, for someone of impsoverished background it seemed pretty impossible and I had no idea how to fill out the FAFSA or interpret my own taxes staements.

Lucky, I landed in college but, not without alot of help. My first year at community college was filled with indecision and uncertainty, would this pay off better than the trade school? Would I be able to find a job after graduation? What career could I choose that was stimulating, paid well and would be in demand in 5 years when I graduated? Would that career bring me more satisfaction than others?
By my second year, I was content to remain undecided until I received my transfer degree and moved on to a four year university. Mostly I was happy to be succeeding at something other than a minimum wage dead end job. Just when you stop looking - you find love, or so they say, and I found my love for sociology after I stopped stressing about my future occupation. I enrolled in History of the French Revolution at Spokane Falls Community College; this class, and Marx, is at the very root of my understanding and love for Sociology.
Taking the course helped me to understand the historical context of Sociology as a discipline and showed me its roots in labor, industrial capitalism and revolution. The professor worked a lot of sociology into the lectures, although I did not realize it at the time. By doing so, he introduced us to many sociological concepts without calling them such. Social structures of the time were outlined and explained as being stratified by class and birth. We touched on Anomie as a result of peoples move from agriculture to industrialization and spent a few days discussing the Communist Manifesto and Marx’s’ various solutions to social problems associated with rural to urban migration and exploitive capitalism. This class prepared me to accept Sociology as a possible discipline because it gave historical legitimacy, concrete examples and interdisciplinary understanding to a subject that I had been very unaware of.
The next quarter I enrolled in Sociology of Race, Gender and Ethnicity and from the first day I felt intellectual stimulation like I had never experienced before. I felt like I was discovering the most meaningful subject in my education. When I wasn’t in class, I was talking about the class and when I wasn’t talking about it, I was thinking about it. So it seemed to me. It still does. I’m hooked and I haven’t really looked back since. Personally, it meant I could stop blaming myself for my failed attempt at entering the workforce without an education or social commection. I gained and understanding of how my situation is linked to political, economic and cultural factors that are both beyond my control and potentintially within societies agency to change. Sociology gave me a platform for addressing inequalities that I had felt but didn’t know how to express. Finally, my perception that society is patriarchal, racist and classist could be acknowledged through a subject that deals specifically with the differential power between genders, races and classes. I was amazed at how my concerns and ideas were shared by others, that I wasn’t “too sensitive” and others were aware and had experienced what I did. It was revolutionary.
What is it about Sociology that sets my mind on fire? I have always been interested in behavior. Sociology is the study of peoples and groups interactions - the movements between people that constitute the world we live in. I believe that I have always been studying Sociology, since I first watched two people interact and wondered, why? I love that I can take sociological thinking and apply it to any subject anywhere and look forward to “the familiar being transformed in its meaning (Berger, 1963).”
Now that I know about Sociology, I find that it permeates daily life and so I believe it to be relevant and worthwhile; two things that keep me returning to the subject. What I loved about sociology the most was how I learned to see beyond my individual experience and place my life within the context of greater forces such as economics and politics. C.W. Mills sociological imagination is defined as the ability to see the connection between the self and the greater world and is perhaps the most powerful tool for guiding and shaping our understanding of life. I no longer fear the tide that made me feel powerless, I use the sociological imagination to recognize the forces that influence my choices and in that recognition I gain the power to exert a greater influence where I am going and who I am.