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.