Wars. Somanywars.Wars outside andwars inside.Culturalwars, science wars, and wars against terrorism.Wars against poverty andwars against the poor. Wars against ignorance and wars out of ignorance. My question is simple: Should we be at war, too, we, the scholars, the intellectuals? Is it really our duty to add fresh ruins to fields of ruins? Is it really the task of the humanities to add deconstruction to destruction? More iconoclasm to iconoclasm?What has become of the critical spirit? Has it run out of steam? Quite simply, my worry is that it might not be aiming at the right target. To remain in the metaphorical atmosphere of the time, military experts constantly revise their strategic doctrines, their contingency plans, the size, direction, and technology of their projectiles, their smart bombs, theirmissiles; I wonder why we, we alone, would be saved from those sorts of revisions. It does not seem to me that we have been as quick, in academia, to prepare ourselves for new threats, new dangers, new tasks, new targets. Are wenot like thosemechanical toys that endlesslymake the samegesturewhen everything else has changed around them? Would it not be rather terrible if we were still training young kids—yes, young recruits, young cadets—for wars that are no longer possible, fighting enemies long gone, conquering territories that no longer exist, leaving them ill-equipped in the face of threats we had not anticipated, for whichwe are so thoroughlyunprepared? Generals have always been accused of being on the ready one war late— especially French generals, especially these days. Would it be so surprising,

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Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern

A century after the publication of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism, a major new work examines network-based organization, employee autonomy and post-Fordist horizontal work structures.

The New Spirit of Capitalism

Twenty years ago, in the pages of the, Journal of Common Market Studies, Hedley Bull launched a searing critique of the European Community's "civilian power" in international affairs. Since that time the increasing role of the European Union (EU) in areas of security and defence policy has led to a seductiveness in adopting the notion of "military power Europe". In contrast, I will attempt to argue that by thinking beyond traditional conceptions of the EU's international role and examining the case study of its international pursuit of the abolition of the death penalty, we may best conceive of the EU as a "normative power Europe".

Normative Power Europe: A Contradiction in Terms?

Chapter 1: An Introduction to McDonaldization McDonald's as an American and a Global Icon The Long Arm of McDonaldization The Dimensions of McDonaldization Critique of McDonaldization: The Irrationality of Rationality Illustrating the Dimensions of McDonaldization: The Case of Ikea The Advantages of McDonaldization What Isn't McDonaldized? A Look Ahead Chapter 2: The Past, Present, and Future of McDonaldization: From the Iron Cage to the Fast-Food Factory and Beyond Bureaucratization: Making Life More Rational The Holocaust: Mass-Produced Death Scientific Management: Finding the One Best Way The Assembly Line: Turning Workers Into Robots Levittown: Putting Up Houses? Boom, Boom, Boom? Shopping Centers: Malling America McDonald's: Creating the "Fast-Food Factory" McDonaldization and Contemporary Social Changes Chapter 3: Efficiency and Calculability Drive-Throughs and Finger Foods Streamlining the Process Simplifying the Product Putting Customers to Work Calculability: Big Macs and Little Chips Emphasizing Quantity Rather Than Quality of Products Reducing Production and Service to Numbers Chapter 4: Predictability and Control Predictability: It Never Rains on Those Little Houses on the Hillside Creating Predictable Settings Scripting Interaction With Customers Making Employee Behavior Predictable Creating Predictable Products and Processes Minimizing Danger and Unpleasantness Control: Human and Nonhuman Robots Controlling Employees Controlling Customers Controlling the Process and the Product The Ultimate Examples of Control: Birth and Death? Chapter 5: The Irrationality of Rationality: Traffic Jams on Those "Happy Trails" Inefficiency: Long Lines at the Checkout High Cost: Better Off at Home False Friendliness: "Hi, George" Disenchantment: Where's the Magic? Health and Environmental Hazards: A Day's Calories in One Fast Food Meal Homogenization: It's No Different in Paris Dehumanization: Getting Hosed at "Trough and Brew" Chapter 6: Dealing with McDonaldization: A Practical Guide Creating "Reasonable" Alternatives: Sometimes You Really Do Have to Break the Rules Fighting Back Collectively: Saving Hearts, Minds, Taste Buds, and the Piazza Di Spagna Coping Individually: "Skunk Works," Blindfolded Children, and Fantasy Worlds Some Concluding Thoughts Chapter 7: Globalization and the Possibility of the DeMcDonaldization of Society? Globalization and McDonaldization The DeMcDonaldization of Society The Internet and DeMcDonaldization Bibliography Notes Index

The McDonaldization of Society

n today's fast changing and interconnected global world, researchers in a variety of areas have come to see identity as an important analytic tool for understanding schools and society. A focus on the contextually specific ways in which people act out and recognize identities allows a more dynamic approach than the sometimes overly general and static trio of "race, class, and gender." However, the term identity has taken on a great many different meanings in the literature. Rather than survey this large literature, I will sketch out but one approach that draws on one consistent strand of that literature. This is not to deny that other, equally useful approaches are possible, based on different selections from the literature.

Identity as an analytic lens for research in education

The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning point. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy. The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgement to separate truth from false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance. Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine Set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real.

Simulacra and Simulation

THE FORMAL LITURGY OF THE OBJECT Preface - George Ritzer The Miraculous Status of Consumption The Vicious Circle of Growth THE THEORY OF CONSUMPTION The Social Logic of Consumption Towards a Theory of Consumption Personalization or the Smallest Marginal Difference (SMD) MASS MEDIA, SEX AND LEISURE Mass-Media Culture The Finest Consumer Object The Body The Drama of Leisure or the Impossibility of Wasting One's Time The Mystique of Solicitude Anomie in the Affluent Society CONCLUSION On Contemporary Alienation or the End of the Pact with the Devil

The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures

For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign

A cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society, The System of Objects is a tour de force - a theoretical letter-in-a-bottle tossed into the ocean in 1968, which brilliantly communicates to us all the live ideas of the day.

The System of Objects

Introduction - Mike Gane The End of Production The Order of Simulacra Fashion, or The Enchanting Spectacle of the Code The Body, or The Mass Grave of Signs Political Economy and Death The Extermination of the Name of God

Jean Baudrillard

Papers

Simulacra and Simulation

The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures

For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign

The System of Objects

Symbolic Exchange and Death