Bulletin

Issue: April 2004

Seminars & Festivals

Mackered Down Under?

Has Australia been McDonalised - with its culture and values deeply infiltrated and remoulded into an American format?

This was one of the questions addressed during a public seminar by one of the world's most influential sociologists, Professor George Ritzer, at La Trobe University in March.

Professor Ritzer spoke and joined discussions at the seminar entitled The Globalization of Nothing - the title of his latest book.

Professor Ritzer of the University of Maryland is also the author of The McDonaldization of Society, which according to seminar organiser, Professor Peter Beilharz of La Trobe's Sociology Program, is probably the most influential work of sociology published in English in the last decade.

The book has been translated into many languages. Professor Ritzer's other recent books include Expressing America; Enchanting a Disenchanted World.

The McDonaldization of Society has already attracted two volumes of criticism and appreciation. The most striking claim in the book is that McDonalds has become a second-order model for other systems of delivering goods and services.

The problem is not just junk food but junk culture with McHospitals, McUniversities - even McSociology.

Professor Beilharz says that the book's greatest contribution has been to make available to a new, young audience a form of cultural critique, making them face the challenge of thinking outside the box, outside the nodule.

Prior to his work in applied social theory, Professor Ritzer authored a string of books on metatheory beginning with Sociology: A Multiple Paradigm Science (1975) and culminating in Metatheorizing in Sociology (1991).

He received the degree of Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) during a ceremony at La Trobe on 23 March.

Professor Ritzer spent several days at La Trobe working with staff, undergraduate and post postgraduate students.•

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