Qualitative Research in Gambling : Exploring the Production and Consumption of Risk

Introduction Part One: Between Methods 1. Gambling Autobiography 2. Gambling Labour 3. Gambling and Fiction 4. Numbers, Suites, Trumps and Jokers Part Two: Between Worlds: New Gambling Spaces 5. Backgammon and Casinos in Cyprus 6. Card Playing in Papua New Guinea 7. Delhi Bookmakers 8. New Markets for Gambling in Slovenia Part Three: Between the State and the Player 9. Lotteries in Israel 10. ‘Ahead of the Witches’: South African Lotteries 11. Chinese Lottery Gambling 12. Gambling Regulation and the EU Part Four: Borderless Risks 13. Gambling, Play, Social Media and Young People in Japan 14. Mobile Phone Gambling as a Global Assemblage 15. Monetising Social Media: The Social Construction of Virtual Currencies 16. Currency Speculation in China Part Five: Between Investment and Gambling 17. Spread Betting in the City 18. Rain Gambling and the Roots of Indian Market Society 19. Weather Derivatives in London 20. Financial Derivatives

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.