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.

About the Author
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.

Reviews

"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

Book Information
ISBN 9781138924550
Author Rebecca Cassidy
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 408g