Academic literature on the topic 'McDonald's Restaurants Ltd'

AbstractInjurious feather pecking in non-cage systems is a serious economic and welfare concern for the egg-producing industry. Here, we describe the first results from an ongoing collaborative project to improve range environment and welfare of laying hens (Gallus gallus domesticus) within the McDonald's Restaurants Ltd, UK supply base. The objective of this study was to investigate, in a commercial situation, the correlation between: i) proportion of range cover and ii) proportion of canopy cover, with plumage damage of end-of-lay hens. The assessment of plumage damage due to injurious feather pecking is a key animal-based welfare indicator for laying hens in non-cage systems. In 2007 and 2008, all laying-hen producers within the McDonald's Restaurants Ltd egg-supply base, were required to plant (if not present already), 5% of the total range area with blocks of trees ether side, and between 20-25 m from the laying hen house. Plumage damage at end of lay was positively correlated with mortality and flocks depleted in summer had less plumage damage at end of lay than flocks depleted in autumn or winter, possibly because of weather conditions at the time of placement. There was no correlation between the proportion (5-90%) of range cover and plumage damage at the end of lay, however, plumage damage was negatively correlated with percent of canopy cover within tree-planted areas. Providing a minimum of 5% tree cover, planted close to the house but with good canopy coverage, may be a feasible and practical method enabling producers to reduce plumage damage due to injurious feather pecking in their laying-hen flocks. Tree cover provision may also provide environmental benefits, such as soil stabilisation, reduced nutrient leaching and carbon sequestration.

McDonalds Corp. is globally famous and is abounded in recent years. It is one of the major chain restaurants that offers a fast food. Basic foods that are served at McDonalds are different types and sizes of burgers, fries, some breakfast, sweets, ice cream and kids meals. McDonalds products have increased loyalty from customers, which has led to the rise of an uneven stock price. So the data is not stationary and makes the role of the analysts ability to forecast the future condition of the organization important. The aim of this paper is to analyze and forecast the opening stock price of McDonalds Corp. over a period time

Learning outcomes The case illustrates the challenges of managing JVs in emerging markets. specifically, after going through the case, students should be able to: i.Analyze the contexts in which firms need to form JVs and evaluate this need in the context of emerging markets such as India; ii.Understand how multinational corporations can achieve success in emerging markets, specifically the role of strategic (broader than the product) adaptation in success; iii.Evaluate the impact of conflict between partners on the short-term and long-term performance of a JV; and iv.Create alternatives, evaluate each alternative’s pros and cons, and recommend appropriate decisions to address the situation after a JV unravels and the organization is faced with quality and other challenges. Case overview/synopsis McDonald’s, the global giant in the quick service industry, entered India in 1993 and formed two JVs in 1995 one with Vikram Bakshi (Connaught Plaza Restaurants Ltd or CPRL) to own and operate stores in the northern and eastern zones, and another with Amit Jatia (Hardcastle Restaurants Private Limited or HRPL) to own and operate stores in the western and southern zones. Over the next 12 years, both the JVs made steady progress by opening new stores while also achieving better store-level metrics. Though CPRL was ahead of HRPL in terms of the number of stores and total revenues earned in 2008, the year marked the beginning of a long-running dispute between the two partners in CPRL, Bakshi and McDonald’s. Over the next 11 years, Bakshi and McDonald’s tried to block each other, filed court cases against each other and also exchanged recriminations in media. The feud hurt the performance of CPRL, which fell behind HRPL in terms of growth and other metrics. On May 9, 2019, the feuding partners reached an out-of-court settlement under which McDonald’s would buy out Bakshi’s shares in CPRL, thus making CPRL a subsidiary. Robert Hunghanfoo, who had been appointed head of CPRL after Bakshi’s exit, announced a temporary shutdown of McDonald’s stores to take stock of the current situation. He had to make a number of critical decisions that would impact the company’s performance in the long-term. Complexity academic level MBA, Executive MBA and executive development programs. Supplementary materials Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Subject code CSS 11: Strategy.

Subject area Business strategy. Study level/applicability The case has been written with the objective of enabling the students to understand the dynamics of a rapidly changing emerging market. It is structured for use at a Master-level course and an MBA audience in the subject of Business Strategy. Case overview The case details the growth story of American fast food chain McDonalds in West and South India markets. Westlife Development Limited (WDL) operates McDonald’s chain of quick service restaurants (QSR) in these markets; they entered the markets in the year 1996 and since then have adopted various market strategies such as investments in multiple format QSRs, aggressive rollouts of new QSRs, increase in product variants etc. for a sustained growth trajectory. However, the increased competition from both the national and international QSR brands and the new segment of competition from “techie” food aggregators challenges their prospects to maintain a number one position in these markets. As Amit Jatia – the Vice President of WDL − prepares his presentation for the scheduled Executive Leadership Team meeting, he seeks answers to two prime questions a) How could WDL once again regain the number one status in these markets? b) What best strategies the team needs to adopt to remain relevant to the Indian consumers? Expected learning outcomes The case study should enable the student: 1. To comprehend the complexities of the Indian QSR market and its competitive dynamics 2. To analyze the factors contributing to the growth of the India QSR sector. 3. To identify the market factors that led WDL to adapt their strategy to the market 4. To understand the significance of business strategy localization as adopted by WDL in the markets of West and South India. 5. To evaluate sources of competitive advantage for McDonald’s in the West and South India markets. Supplementary materials Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes. Subject code CSS 11: Strategy.

The rapid development of technology has led to the habit of taking part in changes in various generations, including Indonesia which has the interest in consuming fast food. Many foreign famous brands become favorites, for them to compete. The right marketing strategy. One of the fast-food McDonald's restaurants from America that wants to continue to exist by issuing the program 'Ini Rasa Kita' which released two cultures. Western-style menus in the form of burgers, have now been made by lifting Indonesian specialties into buger rendang and balado burgers. This program uses the LTO (Limited Time Offer) system in hopes of increasing sales figures. Using qualitative research methods with case study designs, this study interviewed 15 informants from three different generations. The final results state that dominant informants are more likely to be able to receive limited time offers. In line with this, limited time offers stated that they did have anti-competitive features, however, all informants stated that limited time offer proposals could not oppose them.

Learning outcomes The case presents an ideal platform for discussing the branding strategy, brand elements and the factors that contributed to success of an entrepreneurial venture in the quick-service restaurant (QSR) segment. Further, it enables students to discuss changes that are necessitated as the firm looks for new growth avenues. After working through the case and assignment questions, students will be able to analyze the entrepreneurial journey of a startup in red ocean markets by assessing the factors that contributed to its success; comprehend the importance of branding strategy for small business – choosing/designing of brand elements and selecting the positioning strategy; and assess changes needed in the branding strategy over time and devise strategies for the continued success of the firm. Case overview/synopsis Kolkata-based QSR chain Wow! Momo was bootstrapped with a meager INR 30,000 in 2008 by two school friends Sagar Daryani and Binod Kumar. It went on to become India’s Wow! Momo very first QSR specializing in momos. By the year 2019, Wow! Momo was dishing out India’s favourite street food, “momos” from 300 outlets across 15 cities. It also claimed to have captured 90% market share in the organized momo business. The startup grew at a CAGR of over 50% between 2015 and 2019 and reported INR 1.19bn revenue in financial year 2019 with an EBITDA of 9.3%. Wow Momo Foods Pvt. Ltd (WMF), the parent company of Wow! Momo, had tasted stupendous success within a short period and set an ambitious goal of achieving revenue of INR 10bn by 2023–2024. Wow! Momo had achieved top of mind recall among the target customers and was also vying for the same share of wallet as formidable international giants such as McDonald’s, Domino’s, Burger King and KFC. However, compared to these large players, Wow! Momo offered a limited menu and a smaller average ticket size. At the same time, Wow! Momo’s market share was also threatened by a host of branded momo players that offered a similar menu and pricing. Both these factors did not argue well for WMF’s mammoth growth objective. Achieving revenue of INR 1.19bn in a matter of just 10 years was no small feat, but reaching targeted INR 10bn in half that time needed a different game plan altogether. The founders clearly needed to rethink their strategies for the next phase of growth. What would be the next growth driver for the company? Should it look for greener pastures outside India? Was it time to diversify the menu and think beyond momos? If so, then should new items be added to existing menu or a new brand be launched altogether? The case maps the journey of two entrepreneurs as they went on to set up a successful QSR chain. It examines their trials and tribulations as well as successful implementation of marketing strategy. It also looks at the dilemmas faced by a startup as it searches for new avenues for growth. Complexity academic level Graduate and postgraduate courses in Management. Supplementary materials Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Subject code CSS 8: Marketing.

The state of the quick service restaurants in Nigeria is very poor and this has led to an increasing need for an efficient and effective start-up in the main cities of Nigeria. For customers of fast-food restaurants, the motivation for consumer purchase is quick service, taste, diversity of dishes, healthy food, and convenience. This is very rare in Nigeria and investors can turn this problem into an opportunity for investment income through Franchising. As more Nigerians get involved with very challenging and demanding jobs, their eating pattern is significantly affected. From eating three meals in a day, these individuals now eat twice a day. The purpose of this article is to navigate through the minds of the Nigerian restaurant customers, identify potential customers, analyze and understand competitors’ business models while identifying Franchising as a point of entry. For investors to understand customer behavior and purchasing habit in Nigeria regarding restaurants, a survey was conducted on Consumer Preference on Fast-Food representatives of the Nigerian population with a focus on persons living in the popular urban areas of Nigeria which was generalized to represent the whole population. The perception of fast food by respondents is that it is a quick fix service and a food option which some respondents do not consider unhealthy even if they do not encourage over-dependence on it. This is contrary to most findings and perceptions in studies in European and Asian countries hence offering a different dynamic to consumer behavior in Nigeria. The criteria for the analysis are Demographics, Behavioral, Purchase motivation, and Purchasing capacity. This brings about the means to figure out the wishes of customers and the value proposition that would be required by investors to achieve customer satisfaction. In this manner, the McDonald’s organization can create unswerving clients in Nigeria.

McDonald’s India is a real-life, undisguised decision case. This US-based fast food multinational corporation set shop in India in early 1990s to gain early mover advantage in a country with a huge population. It struck joint ventures with two domestic Master Franchisee to grow its business. The company made efforts to localize its menu and customize its offerings to suit domestic customers. With the passage of time competition intensified and so did customer expectations. Of the two Master Franchisees, while Westlife Development Ltd. maintained cordial relations with McDonald’s, the chief executive officer of Connaught Plaza Restaurants Ltd. Vikram Bakshi became an impediment in its business plans. Differences between McDonald’s and Bakshi reached a flash point and the matter landed in the courts in India and London. Even after several years of litigation no clear winner emerged. As a consequence, while operations of Westlife Development flourished, the business of Connaught Plaza Restaurants remained stunted. While the two partners in the joint venture clashed, competitors took advantage of the situation to capture emerging opportunities. Even after over two decades of operations in the country, McDonald’s is not making profits. On the contrary it has accumulated losses of ₹4.22 billion by the end of 2018. The challenge facing McDonald’s is how to find a quick solution to the long-drawn problem and thereby accelerate the pace of growth of its business in one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

McDonald’s India is a real-life, undisguised decision case. This US-based fast food multinational corporation set shop in India in early 1990s to gain early mover advantage in a country with a huge population. It struck joint ventures with two domestic Master Franchisee to grow its business. The company made efforts to localize its menu and customize its offerings to suit domestic customers. With the passage of time competition intensified and so did customer expectations. Of the two Master Franchisees, while Westlife Development Ltd. maintained cordial relations with McDonald’s, the chief executive officer of Connaught Plaza Restaurants Ltd. Vikram Bakshi became an impediment in its business plans. Differences between McDonald’s and Bakshi reached a flash point and the matter landed in the courts in India and London. Even after several years of litigation no clear winner emerged. As a consequence, while operations of Westlife Development flourished, the business of Connaught Plaza Restaurants remained stunted. While the two partners in the joint venture clashed, competitors took advantage of the situation to capture emerging opportunities. Even after over two decades of operations in the country, McDonald’s is not making profits. On the contrary it has accumulated losses of ₹4.22 billion by the end of 2018. The challenge facing McDonald’s is how to find a quick solution to the long-drawn problem and thereby accelerate the pace of growth of its business in one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

"You could think of our kind of scholarship," he said, "as something like 'slow food' in a fast-food culture."— Ivan Kreilkamp, co-editor of Victorian Studies(Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2009) John Hartley’s entertaining and polemical defense of a disappearing art form (the print copy journal designed to be ripped eagerly from its envelope and read from cover to cover like a good book) came my way via the usual slightly disconcerting M/C Journal overture: I believe that your research interests and background make you a potential expert reviewer of the manuscript, "LAMENT FOR A LOST RUNNING ORDER? OBSOLESCENCE AND ACADEMIC JOURNALS," which has been submitted to the '' [sic] issue of M/C Journal. The submission's extract is inserted below, and I hope that you will consider undertaking this important task for us. Automated e-mails like these keep strange company, with reminders about overdue library items and passwords about to expire. Inevitably their tone calls to mind the generic flattery of the internet scam that announces foreign business opportunities or an unexpectedly large windfall from a deceased relative. At face value, this e-mail confirms John Hartley’s suspicions about the personalised craft of journal curation. Journal editing, he implies, is going the way of drywalling and smithying—by the time we realise these ancient and time-intensive skills have been lost, it’ll be too late. The usual culprit is to the fore—the internet—and the risk presented by obsolescence is very significant. At stake is the whole rich and messy infrastructure of academic professional identity: scholarly communication, goodwill, rank, trust, service to peers, collegiality, and knowledge itself. As a time-poor reader of journals both online and in print I warmed to this argument, and enjoyed reading about the particularities of journal editing: the cultivation and refinement of a specialised academic skill set involving typefaces, cover photographs and running order. Journal editors are our creative directors. Authors think selfishly and not always consistently about content, position and opportunity, but it’s the longer term commitment of editors to taking care of their particular shingle in the colourful and crowded bazaar of scholarly publishing, that keeps the market functioning in a way that also works for inspectors and administrators. Thinking of all the print journals I’ve opened and shut and put on shelves (sometimes still in their wrappers) and got down again, and photocopied, and forgotten about, I realised that I do retain a dim sense of their look and shape, and that in practical ways this often helps me remember what was in them. Nevertheless, even having been through the process he describes, whereby “you have to log on to some website and follow prompts in order to contribute both papers and the assessment of papers; interactions with editors are minimal,” I came to the conclusion that he had underestimated the human in the practice of refereeing. I wasn’t sure made me an expert reviewer for this piece, except perhaps that in undertaking the review itself I was practising a kind of expertise that entitled me to reflect on what I was doing. So as a way of wrestling with the self-referentiality of the process of providing an anonymous report on an article whose criticism of blind refereeing I shared, I commented on the corporeality and collegiality of the practice: I knew who I was writing about (and to), and I was conscious of both disagreeing and wondering how to avoid giving offence. I was also cold in my office, and wondering about a coffee. “I suspect the cyborg reviewer is (like most cyborgs) a slightly romantic, or at least rhetorical, fantasy,” I added, a bit defensively. “Indeed, the author admits to practising editorship via a form of human intersubjectivity that involves email, so the mere fact that the communication in some cases is via a website doesn’t seem to render the human obsolete.” The cyborg reviewer wasn’t the only thing bothering me about the underlying assumptions concerning electronic scholarly publishing, however. The idea that the electronic disaggregation of content threatens the obsolescence of the print journal and its editor is a little disingenuous. Keyword searches do grab articles independently of issues, it’s true, but it’s a stretch to claim that this functionality is what’s turning diligent front-to-back readers and library flaneurs into the kinds of online mercenaries we mean when we say “users”. Quite the opposite: journal searches are highly seductive invitations to linger and explore. Setting out from the starting point of a single article, readers can now follow a citation trail, or chase up other articles by the same author or on similar topics, all the while keeping in plain sight the running order that was designed by the editors as an apt framework for the piece when it first appeared. Journal publishers have the keenest investment in nurturing the distinctive brand of each of their titles, and as a result the journal name is never far from view. Even the cover photo and layout is now likely to be there somewhere, and to crop up often as readers retrace their steps and set out again in another direction. So to propose that online access makes the syntactical form of a journal issue irrelevant to readers is to underestimate both the erotics of syntax, and the capacity of online readers to cope with a whole new libidinous economy of searching characterised by multiple syntactical options. And if readers are no longer sequestered within the pages of an individual hard copy journal—there really is a temptation to mention serial monogamy here—their freedom to operate more playfully only draws attention to the structural horizontalities of the academic public sphere, which is surely the basis of our most durable claims to profess expertise. Precisely because we are hyperlinked together across institutions and disciplines, we can justly argue that we are perpetually peer-reviewing each other, in a fairly disinterested fashion, and no longer exclusively in the kinds of locally parochial clusters that have defined (and isolated) the Australian academy. So although disaggregation irritates journal editors, a more credible risk to their craft comes from the disintermediation of scholarly communication that is one of the web’s key affordances. The shift towards user generated content, collaboratively generated, openly accessible and instantly shareable across many platforms, does make traditional scholarly publishing, with its laborious insistence on double blind refereeing, look a bit retro. How can this kind of thing not become obsolete given how long it takes for new ideas to make their way into print, what with all that courtly call and response between referees, editors and authors, and the time consumed in arranging layout and running order and cover photos? Now that the hegemons who propped up the gold standard journals are blogging and podcasting their ideas, sharing their bookmarks, and letting us know what they’re doing by the hour on Twitter, with presumably no loss of quality to their intellectual presence, what kind of premium or scarcity value can we place on the content they used to submit to print and online journals? So it seems to me that the blogging hegemon is at least as much of a problem for the traditional editor as the time challenged browser hoping for a quick hit in a keyword search. But there are much more complicated reasons why the journal format itself is not at risk, even from www.henryjenkins.org. Indeed, new “traditional” journals are being proposed and launched all the time. The mere award of an A* for the International Journal of Cultural Studies in the Australian journal rankings (Australian Research Council) confirms that journals are persistently evaluated in their own right, that the brand of the aggregating instrument still outranks the bits and pieces of disaggregated content, and that the relative standing of different journals depends precisely on the quantification of difficulty in meeting the standards (or matching the celebrity status) of their editors, editorial boards and peer reviewing panels. There’s very little indication in this process that either editors or reviewers are facing obsolescence; too many careers still depend on their continued willingness to stand in the way of the internet’s capacity to let anyone have a go at presenting ideas and research in the public domain. As the many inputs to the ERA exercise endlessly, and perhaps a bit tediously, confirmed, it’s the reputation of editors and their editorial practices that signals the exclusivity of scholarly publishing: in the era of wikis and blogs, an A* journal is one club that’s not open to all. Academia 1.0 is resilient for all these straightforward reasons. Not only in Australia, tenure and promotion depend on it. As a result, since the mid 1990s, editors, publishers, librarians and other stakeholders in scholarly communication have been keeping a wary eye on the pace and direction of change to either its routines or its standards. Their consistent attention has been on the proposition the risk comes from something loosely defined as “digital”. But as King, Tenopir and Clark point out in their study of journal readership in the sciences, the relevance of journal content itself has been extensively disputed and investigated across the disciplines since the 1960s. Despite the predictions of many authors in the 1990s that electronic publishing and pre-publishing would challenge the professional supremacy of the print journal, it seems just as likely that the simple convenience of filesharing has made more vetted academic material available, more easily, to more readers. As they note in a waspish foonote, even the author of one of the most frequently cited predictions that scholarly journals were on the way out had to modify his views, “perhaps due to the fact that his famous 1996 [sic] article "Tragic Loss or Good Riddance? The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholarly Journals" has had thousands of hits or downloads on his server alone.” (King et al,; see also Odlyzko, " Tragic Loss" and "Rapid Evolution"). In other words, all sides now seem to agree that “digital” has proved to be both opportunity and threat to scholarly publication. Odlyzko’s prediction of the disappearance of the print journal and its complex apparatus of self-perpetuation was certainly premature in 1996. So is John Hartley right that it’s time to ask the question again? Earlier this year, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s article “Humanities Journals Confront Identity Crisis”, which covered much of the same ground, generated brisk online discussion among journal editors in the humanities (Howard; see also the EDITOR-L listserv archive). The article summarised the views of a number of editors of “traditional” journals, and offset these with the views of a group representing the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, canvassing the possibility that scholarly publishing could catch up to the opportunities that we tend to shorthand as “web 2.0”. The short-lived CELJ blog discussion led by Jo Guldi in February 2009 proposed four principles we might expect to shape the future of scholarly publishing in the humanities: technical interoperability, which is pretty uncontroversial; the expansion of scholarly curation to a role in managing and making sense of “the noise of the web”; diversification of content types and platforms; and a more inclusive approach to the contribution of non-academic experts. (Guldi et al.) Far from ceding the inexorability of their own obsolescence, the four authors of this blog (each of them journal editors) have re-imagined the craft of editing, and have drafted an amibitious but also quite achievable manifesto for the renovation of scholarly communication. This is focused on developing a new and more confident role for the academy in the next phase of the development of the knowledge-building capacity of the web. Rather than confining themselves to being accessed only by their professional peers (and students) via university libraries in hardcopy or via institutional electronic subscription, scholars should be at the forefront of the way knowledge is managed and developed in the online public sphere. This would mean developing metrics that worked as well for delicious and diigo as they do for journal rankings; and it would mean a more upfront contribution to quality assurance and benchmarking of information available on the web, including information generated from outside the academy. This resonates with John Hartley’s endorsement of wiki-style open refereeing, which as an idea contains a substantial backwards nod to Ginsparg’s system of pre-publication of the early 1990s (see Ginsparg). It also suggests a more sophisticated understanding of scholarly collaboration than the current assumption that this consists exclusively of a shift to multiply-authored content, the benefit of which has tended to divide scholars in the humanities (Young). But it was not as a reviewer or an author that this article really engaged me in thinking about the question of human obsolescence. Recently I’ve been studying the fragmentation, outsourcing and automation of work processes in the fast food industry or, as it calls itself, the Quick Service Restaurant trade. I was drawn into this study by thinking about the complex reorganisation of time and communication brought about by the partial technologisation of the McDonalds drive-thru in Australia. Now that drive-thru orders are taken through a driveway speaker, the order window (and its operator) have been rendered obsolete, and this now permanently closed window is usually stacked high with cardboard boxes. Although the QSR industry in the US has experimented with outsourcing ordering to call centres at other locations (“May I take your order?”), in Australia the task itself has simply been added to the demands of customer engagement at the paying window, with the slightly odd result that the highest goal of customer service at this point is to be able to deal simultaneously with two customers at two different stages of the drive-thru process—the one who is ordering three Happy Meals and a coffee via your headset, and the one who is sitting in front of you holding out money—without offending or confusing either. This formal approval of a shift from undivided customer attention to the time-efficiency of multitasking is a small but important reorientation of everyday service culture, making one teenager redundant and doubling the demands placed on the other. The management of quick service restaurant workers and their productivity offers us a new perspective on the pressures we are experiencing in the academic labour market. Like many of my colleagues, I have been watching with a degree of ambivalence the way in which the national drive to quantify excellence in research in Australia has resulted in some shallow-end thinking about how to measure what it is that scholars do, and how to demonstrate that we are doing it competitively. Our productivity is shepherded by the constant recalibration of our workload, conceived as a bundle of discrete and measurable tasks, by anxious institutions trying to stay ahead in the national game of musical chairs, which only offers a limited number of seats at the research table—while still keeping half an eye on their enterprise bargaining obligations. Or, as the Quick Service Restaurant sector puts it: Operational margins are narrowing. While you need to increase the quality, speed and accuracy of service, the reality is that you also need to control labor costs. If you reduce unnecessary labor costs and improve workforce productivity, the likelihood of expanding your margins increases. Noncompliance can cost you. (Kronos) In their haste to increase quality, speed and accuracy of academic work, while lowering labor costs and fending off the economic risk of noncompliance, our institutions have systematically overlooked the need to develop meaningful ways to accommodate the significant scholarly work of reading, an activity that takes real time, and that in its nature is radically incompatible with the kinds of multitasking we are all increasingly using to manage the demands placed on us. Without a measure of reading, we fall back on the exceptionally inadequate proxy of citation. As King et al. point out, citation typically skews towards a small number of articles, and the effect of using this as a measure of reading is to suggest that the majority of articles are never read at all. Their long-term studies of what scientists read, and why, have been driven by the need to challenge this myth, and they have demonstrated that while journals might not be unwrapped and read with quite the Christmas-morning eagerness that John Hartley describes, their content is eventually read more than once, and often more than once by the same person. Both electronic scholarly publishing, and digital redistribution of material original published in print, have greatly assisted traditional journals in acquiring something like the pass-on value of popular magazines in dentists’ waiting rooms. But for all this to work, academics have to be given time to sit and read, and as it would be absurd to try to itemise and remunerate this labour specifically, then this time needs to be built into the normative workload for anyone who is expected to engage in any of the complex tasks involved in the collaborative production of knowledge. With that in mind, I concluded my review on what I hoped was a constructive note of solidarity. “What’s really under pressure here—forms of collegiality, altruism and imaginative contributions to a more outward-facing type of scholarship—is not at risk from search engines, it seems to me. What is being pressured into obsolescence, risking subscriptions to journals as much as purchases of books, is the craft and professional value placed on reading. This pressure is not coming from the internet, but from all the other bureaucratic rationalities described in this paper, that for the time being do still value journals selectively above other kinds of public contribution, but fail to appreciate the labour required to make them appear in any form, and completely overlook the labour required to absorb their contents and respond.” For obvious reasons, my warm thanks are due to John Hartley and to the two editors of this M/C Journal issue for their very unexpected invitation to expand on my original referee’s report.References Australian Research Council. “The Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Initiative: Journal Lists.” 2009. 3 July 2009 ‹http://www.arc.gov.au/era/era_journal_list.htm›. Ginsparg, Paul. “Can Peer Review be Better Focused?” 2003. 1 July 2009 ‹http://people.ccmr.cornell.edu/~ginsparg/blurb/pg02pr.html›. Guldi, Jo, Michael Widner, Bonnie Wheeler, and Jana Argersinger. The Council of Editors of Learned Journals Blog. 2009. 1 July 2009 ‹http://thecelj.blogspot.com›. Howard, Jennifer. “Humanities Journals Confront Identity Crisis.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 27 Mar. 2009. 1 July 2009 ‹http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i29/29a00102.htm›. King, Donald, Carol Tenopir, and Michael Clarke. "Measuring Total Reading of Journal Articles." D-Lib Magazine 12.10 (2006). 1 July 2009 ‹http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october06/king/10king.html›. Kronos Incorporated. “How Can You Reduce Your Labor Costs without Sacrificing Speed of Service?” (2009). 1 July 2009 ‹http://www.qsrweb.com/white_paper.php?id=1738&download=1›.“May I Take Your Order? Local McDonald's Outsources to a Call Center.” Billings Gazette, Montana, 5 July 2006. SharedXpertise Forum. 1 July 2009 ‹http://www.sharedxpertise.org/file/3433/mcdonalds-outsourcing-to-call-center.html›.Odlyzko, Andrew. “The Rapid Evolution of Scholarly Publishing.” Learned Publishing 15.1 (2002): 7-19. ———. “Tragic Loss or Good Riddance? The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholarly Journals.” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 42 (1995): 71-122. Young, Jeffrey. “Digital Humanities Scholars Collaborate More on Journal Articles than 'Traditional' Researchers.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 27 April 2009. 1 July 2009 ‹http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3736/digital-humanities-scholars-collaborate-more-on-journal-articles-than-on-traditional-researchers›.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Western Sydney, 2008.
A thesis submitted to the University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, Centre for Cultural Research, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Includes bibliography.

The thesis offers a gastronomic meditation on the ambiguity and complexity of meanings signified by McDonald’s as one of the most powerful food symbols of the late twentieth-century Western society. Using an advance on the structuralist perspective, the thesis argues that it is important to understand food not simply as a surface representation of the social order but as a product of a constant, constitutive dialectic between order and disorder and a dual perception of order. The search for the complex meanings of McDonald’s is pursued firstly by bringing the concept of disorder to centre stage to form a dialectic relationship between order and disorder; secondly, by setting McDonald’s at the interface of modernity and post modernity, positioned in an intersection of two competing versions of the history of food and of order as expressed through food. Here the dominant historical narrative expresses the triumph of the order of the bourgeoisie through the work of Elias and ‘the civilizing process’, with the counter-narrative of Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque highlighting the continuing importance of disorder. These narratives are explored at two key moments of food history, where the order/disorder dialectic can be seen to play a different role. The first is the interface of medieval ‘disorder’ and the coming bourgeois order of modernity, where Rabelais is the key text and secondly; the early nineteenth-century, where Brillat-Savarin is used as a marker of the triumph of eighteenth-century rationalism. It is only by reference to the order/disorder dialectic and the duality of order that the ambiguity of complex food symbols such as McDonald’s can be better understood, and thus become, importantly, a meditation on the nature of society in the pursuit of an examined existence.
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The thesis offers a gastronomic meditation on the ambiguity and complexity of meanings signified by McDonald’s as one of the most powerful food symbols of the late twentieth-century Western society. Using an advance on the structuralist perspective, the thesis argues that it is important to understand food not simply as a surface representation of the social order but as a product of a constant, constitutive dialectic between order and disorder and a dual perception of order. The search for the complex meanings of McDonald’s is pursued firstly by bringing the concept of disorder to centre stage to form a dialectic relationship between order and disorder; secondly, by setting McDonald’s at the interface of modernity and post modernity, positioned in an intersection of two competing versions of the history of food and of order as expressed through food. Here the dominant historical narrative expresses the triumph of the order of the bourgeoisie through the work of Elias and ‘the civilizing process’, with the counter-narrative of Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque highlighting the continuing importance of disorder. These narratives are explored at two key moments of food history, where the order/disorder dialectic can be seen to play a different role. The first is the interface of medieval ‘disorder’ and the coming bourgeois order of modernity, where Rabelais is the key text and secondly; the early nineteenth-century, where Brillat-Savarin is used as a marker of the triumph of eighteenth-century rationalism. It is only by reference to the order/disorder dialectic and the duality of order that the ambiguity of complex food symbols such as McDonald’s can be better understood, and thus become, importantly, a meditation on the nature of society in the pursuit of an examined existence.