nd relationships between individuals and institutions. Ironically, “Her original power was nothing more than was due to earnestness and intellectual clearness within a certain range,” Pichanick observes (111). Martineau’s technique--as Rizter’--results in an expression of interpretation that leaps over the obstacles of theoretical approach by intertwining sociological analysis theory into a forward-moving dynamic. Ritzer, in both The McDonaldization of Society and Expressing America: A Critique of the Global Credit Card Society, shows evidence of application of Max Weber’s rationalization process, for example, as well as other theoretical perspectives including those of C. Wright Mills, George Simmel, and Karl Marx. But Rizter then employs these constructs to describe what he terms a “range of closely related phenomena that are sweeping across and dramatically altering… America and increasingly a large portion of the rest of the world,” as they interact (Ritzer 203). Relying on both “micro and macro analyses where individual behavior intertwines with the larger social environment, Rizter’s central view offers a correcting paradigm”, notes theoretical observer M.J. Alhabeeb, of the dilemma that has entrenched sociological theory and its application for the past two decades (Alhabeeb 77). Ritzer’s work is actually founded in the interactionist approach that Martineau pioneered, and clearly, he would recognize it as such.The interactionist framework draws attention to the patterns in the ways people combine dispositional and situational information—in other words, it coalesces the elementarist and holistic approaches and applies them to a new construct. By identifying key dispositions expected to affect choice (elementarist), then conceptualizing strategic situations and features according to a holistic theory of images that could be expected to affect choices, ...
