Limited McDonaldization as a Success Recipe: An Ethnographic Study of Yili Driving School in Jinan, China

Current corporate culture studies mainly emphasize the management and motivation of employees within an enterprise, while little consideration is taken of the interaction between the enterprise, employees and customers. Based on an ethnographic study of Yili Driving School in Jinan, this article explores the success recipe of service-oriented enterprises. It argues that the success of the driving school can be attributed to its corporate culture of limited McDonaldization, consisting of two contradictory but coexisting models, i.e. a rationalized and standardized management model and a relational and emotional work model, in which corporate management, employees and consumers are all involved. So far as the driving school is concerned, the school administrators, coaches and students selectively use cultural resources to adopt different action strategies which enable the participants of the corporate culture to achieve a win-win situation. This study highlights not only the McDonaldized management of the enterprise, but also the mechanism of emotional cultivation between the driving school, instructors and trainees. The result of this study is hoped to contribute to research on corporate culture and enterprise anthropology by breaking with the previous approaches from within the company.