I think it's evident that you made the right decision about the
sociology course, particularly if the alternative was preparing to
take a diagnostic test.
But I think the use of George Ritzer's vocabulary here is not quite
the same thing as using his ideas. He is trying to show how to make
Max Weber's description of "rationalization" relevant to contemporary
social conditions, by substituting consumer product organizations in
the market (specifically fast food restaurants) for the paradigm type
Weber used: German state bureaucracy. For the purpose of explaining
the concepts, I agree that this is a more useful contemporary
formulation, because more "experience near" for an undergraduate who
has never experienced the Prussian state tempus Otto von Bismarck.
On the other hand, familiarity can be misleading. Once or twice
you're too loose here, I think in the way you use the categories
Ritzer uses to restate Weber. "Efficiency" specifically means for
him that rationalization leads to pervasive efforts to minimize
expenditure of time. To think about the nature of this aspect of
our society's rationalization in your workplace culture, ask how many
of the practices and structures you see around you assume that time
is the dimension of work that should be minimized at each stage.
In other respects, I think the problem with the categories is the
reverse, that you're using them too tightly. This is a problem of
scale: Ritzer like Weber is talking about categories that apply
broadly. A tool for spanning distances morphologically from market
operations to government and thematically from agriculture to culture
does not produce detailed models for interpreting the goings on in
one office over a couple of weeks.
I think this is an example of the tool interfering with the work.
Why not start with your observations, your ethnography of the society
in which you've landed? Don't begin with the template to fit it
into, but with the life around you grasped as openly as you can.
Then you can ask yourself what it means, going from ethnographer to
interpreter, back and forth between your experience of being there
and your effort to sift what it means, the iterative process the late
Clifford Geertz called "ethnographic tacking." Whatever theory you
use in the course of that effort yours or someone else's, but the
cooking it up together is always you.
Let me know, please, if you want to do more revising before I put in
a grade, or whether you'd like to have a grade posted for EIP.