✅ Why a cheeseburger may hold the key to unlocking the value of public relations in management

Corporate communications, public relations, media and management insight

This week's annual research conference at Leeds Business School allowed me to test the research methodology for my PhD project with fellow management researchers. I’m in my fourth year and about to start my own fieldwork to prove the impact of corporate communications and public relations on organisations and management while also recognising its potential harms.

McDonald’s is often used as a case study in business schools to understand various issues such as branding, business models, globalisation, and supply chains. The Economist has even used the Big Mac as a standardised unit of value and currency to benchmark living standards between different countries.

McDonald’s and its golden arches are instantly recognisable. We grow up with Happy Meals and graduate to the full menu. It’s there for birthdays, after-school parties, sports games, weekend shopping trips and at the end of a night out. McDonald’s and its products have become firmly embedded in both popular and management culture.

My interest in McDonald’s, beyond being a consumer of its products, lies in its systematisation of processes at an industrial scale to create standardised products wherever you are in the world. I tested this for myself last week at three of the 1,500 McDonald’s stores in the UK. I paid the same price for three identical cheeseburgers that looked and tasted the same in London and Newcastle.

The systems, processes, and workflow that lead to this level of standardisation have been studied and developed into a concept called McDonaldization. It has been applied to various fields of study, including social studies, to describe the abstract of a complex system into a series of repeatable processes.

This phenomenon is criticised in social science research as it leads to a standardised approach to methodology and fieldwork. You can spot the issue at three levels within corporate communications and public relations research.

• Practitioners as a laboratory

• Surveys as a research instrument

• The replication paradox