"George Ritzer developed the Quadrants as a sociological tool in 1981"... Wait, what?

Background

The Sociology department is in an unfortunately Green-postmodern state at Middlebury. As such, it is burgeoning with promising ideas, but incapable of putting them together in any cohesive or digestible way. This became particularly clear to me in my Theory of Sociology class this fall. Between theory indigestion and the dense readings, I quickly grew exasperated and deliberated some way to make the class more tolerable.

(Really, now. There was a time when I supposed that new ideas were simply impossible to explain concisely in writing. Now, having read Wilber, I know better. Habermas, Foucault, Bourdieu... you are distinguished sociologists. You pioneer new ideas and you can be pretty sure that undergrad students are going to subject to your essays in half a century from now. Couldn't you have some respect for our suffering, and write more clearly and concisely for God's sake?)

Eventually I discovered the utility of what I call "Google recon research", which gives me a background overview of a given theorist's contributions and beliefs before I dive into his own rambly prose. ("His", because the majority of our classical sociologists are male, and the females tend to be a little clearer.)

A surprising discovery: Ritzer's framework

All this rambling is to give context to my surprise when, through such "Google recon", I found this interesting paragraph on George Ritzer's "Integrated Sociological Paradigm", which he allegedly developed in his 1981 book of that title:

"George Ritzer has attempted to construct an Integrated
Sociological Paradigm built upon two distinctions: between micro and
macro levels, and between the objective and subjective. This produces
four dimensions: macro-objective, large-scale material phenomena such
as bureaucracies; macro-subjective, large-scale ideational or
nonmaterial phenomena such as norms; micro-objective, small-scale
material phenomena such as patterns of behavior; and micro-subjective,
small-scale ideational or nonmaterial phenomena such as psychological
states or the cognitive processes involved in "constructing" reality.
These are not conceptualized as dichotomies, but rather as continuums.
Ritzer argues that these dimensions cannot be analyzed separately, and
thus the dimensions are dialectically related, with no particular
dimension necessarily privileged over any other."

This summary essentially defines the Quadrants in a sociological context. That's from this McGraw-Hill textbook summary / review page. Here's also a brief and unspecific blurb on the book on Wikipedia.

Wilber's SES was the first publication where he announced the Quadrants and was published in 1985 or so, right? Given his self-admitted absence from academia for the decade or so [?] prior to SES, I can understand that he might never have heard of Ritzer's development. And certainly, Wilber had a head-start in giving the Quadrants a vertical developmental / genealogical dimension, whereas from the little I know, Ritzer does not seem to have done the same, and in fact treats the divide between quadrants more as spectra with middle-values than as side-by-side dimensions of reality.

No big surprise... but contradicts the way I think about AQAL

From an altitudes perspective, of course, it is no big surprise that multiple people might be converging on the same "discovery" of the Quadrants, which after all make up the terrain on which we all live. But finding Ritzer's preexisting framework is still disorienting to me, because I have gotten so used to thinking of Wilber as the sole pioneer of the Quadrants: while most of Integral Theory is built out of a lot of cobbling, I'm used to seeing the Quadrants as one of the few elements that is fully unique to Integral Theory, that has created the structure to put everything else together.

What do you all think?