Ritzer is currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park. Ritzer was born in 1940 easy contemporary sandwich a Jewish family in upper Manhattan, New York City. Ritzer has one younger brother while his father was a taxi cab driver and his mother was a secretary. Ritzer later described his upbringing as “upper lower class”.
Ritzer graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1958, stating to have “encountered the brightest people I have ever met in my life”. Ritzer began his higher education at City College of New York, a free college at the time. His scholarship in addition to the free college tuition proved to be a benefit to the economic positioning of the Ritzer family. After graduating from CCNY in 1962, Ritzer decided that he was interested in pursuing business again. He was accepted into the M. University of Michigan Ann Arbor, where he received a partial scholarship. Ritzer enrolled in Cornell University’s School of Labor and Industrial Relations Ph.
There, his adviser Harrison Trice suggested that he minor in sociology. Ritzer never earned a degree in sociology, but studied psychology and business. As he said in a later interview, “I basically trained myself as a social theorist, and so I had to learn it all as I went. Despite this challenge, Ritzer found that not being trained in social theory was advantageous for him, because his reasoning was not limited to a particular theoretical perspective. Calculability: America has grown to connect the quantity of a product with the quality of a product and that “bigger is better”.
Predictability: Related to calculability, customers know what to expect from a given producer of goods or services. Some claim that rationalization leads to “more egalitarian” societies. For example, supermarkets and large grocery stores offer variety and availability unlike smaller farmer’s markets from generations past. The increased standardization of society dehumanizes people and institutions. The “assembly line” feel of fast-food restaurants is transcending many other facets of life and removing humanity from previously human experiences. Ritzer is a leading proponent of the study of consumption.
First coined by Alvin Toffler in 1980, the term prosumption is used by Ritzer and Jurgenson, to break down the false dichotomy between production and consumption and describe the dual identity of economic activities. According to Ritzer, “Something” is a locally conceived and controlled social form that is comparatively rich in distinctive substantive content. It also describes things as being fairly unusual. In Ritzer’s research, globalization refers to the rapidly increasing worldwide integration and interdependence of societies and cultures. This book presents a sophisticated argument about the nature of globalization in terms of the consumption of goods and services. Ritzer quotes that globalization consists of glocalization and grobalization. Things are more homogenous and ubiquitous.