Gambling is both a multi-billion dollar international industry and a ubiquitous social and cultural phenomenon. It is also undergoing significant change, with new products and technologies, regulatory models, changing public attitudes and the sheer scale of the gambling enterprise necessitating innovative and mixed methodologies that are flexible, responsive and ‘agile’. This book seeks to demonstrate that researchers should look beyond the existing disciplinary territory and the dominant paradigm of ‘problem gambling’ in order to follow those changes across territorial, political, technical, regulatory and conceptual boundaries.
The book draws on cutting-edge qualitative work in disciplines including anthropology, history and media studies to explore the production and consumption of risk, risky places, risk technology, the gambling industry, and connections between gambling and other kinds of speculation such as financial derivatives. In doing so it addresses some of the most important issues in contemporary social science, including the challenges of studying deterritorialised social phenomena; globalizing technologies and local markets; regulation as it operates across local, regional and international scales; globalization, and the rise of games, virtual worlds, and social media.
Arvustused
"The unique contribution of this volume is perhaps to contrast the views of urban technological assemblages as a heterarchical worlds of multiple orderings and non-linear connections (Amin and Thrift, 2005: 237) or as structured, hierarchalised and narrativised through profoundly unequal relations of power, resource and knowledge' (McFarlane, 2011: 208). On the one hand, this volume reveals the complexity and diversity of objects that enter urban gambling assemblages and their manifold relations. Yet simultaneously, it discloses the uneven power relations within these assemblages that facilitate commercial gambling to transfer resources from poor neighbourhoods to a super-rich elite. As such, this volume makes the case for the gambling industries to be taken seriously as objects of analysis and provides ample grounds for discussion regarding the urban politics of distribution under conditions of late capitalism." Francis Markham, The Australian National University, Australia, published in Urban Studies
Introduction Border I: Between Methods
Chapter
1. Making Money with
Money: Reflections of a Betting Man
Chapter
2. The Socio-Temporal Dynamics of
Gambling: Narratives of Change over Time
Chapter
3. Gambling Histories:
Writing the Past in the Present Border II: Border Crossings
Chapter
4.
Croupiers Sleight of Mind: Playing With Unmanaged Spaces In the Casino
Industry
Chapter
5. Partial Convergence: Social Gaming and Real Money
Gambling
Chapter
6. Turning The Tables: The Global Gambling Industrys
Crusade to Sell Slots in Macau
Chapter
7. Never a Dull Day: Exploring the
Material Organization of Virtual Gambling Border III: Between Worlds
Chapter
8. Playing Properly: Casinos, Blackjack, and Cultural Intimacy in Cyprus
Chapter
9. Betting On People: Bookmaking at Delhi Racecourse
Chapter
10. Bad
Luck, Slippery Money and the South African Lottery
Chapter
11. One-Man
One-Man: How Slot-Machines Facilitate Papua New Guineans Shifting Relations
to Each Other Border IV: Between Investment and Gambling
Chapter
12. Weather
Trading In London: Distinguishing Finance from Gambling
Chapter
13. If You
Don't Care For Your Money, It Won't Care For You: Chronotopes of Risk and
Return in Chinese Wealth Management
Chapter
14. Playing the Market? The Role
of Risk, Uncertainty and Authority in the Construction of Stock Market
Forecasts
Chapter
15. Spread Betting and the City of London
Rebecca Cassidy is a Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has written two monographs about horseracing and betting in Britain and the United States. Her current project, supported by the European Research Council, uses ethnographic methods to study gambling environments in Europe.
Andrea Pisac is a research fellow in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her PhD dissertation explores how foreign books travelling to the UK readership create textual authenticity and authority. Her postdoctoral research focuses on casino and card gambling in Slovenia and its neighbouring region.
Claire Loussouarn is a Research Fellow in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her PhD dissertation explores casino gambling among Chinese migrants in London while her postdoctoral research focuses on the British spread betting industry. Her interests include money, temporality, luck, technology, risk and exchange.
