The American Taste of Globalization: The Case of McDonald’s in Italy

Abstract

This article analyzes the history of McDonald’s restaurants in Italy, in order to investigate the American constituents of globalization and address the question of how globalization reflects and spreads American values.1 The analysis of the chain’s expansion in the peninsula unveils how the American character of globalization resides, not as much in the exportation of McDonald’s Big Mac and French fries, as in the global diffusion of specific American systems of production and consumption, as well as of those standardized operating procedures and business practices that are at the core of the so-called “McDonald’s system.”