Mind the Gap

Critical gambling studies, 2022

Critical Gambling Studies

Book Review: Ng, Janet. (2019). Dreamworld of Casino Capitalism: Macao’s Society, Literature, and Culture. Cambria Press. 257 pp. ISBN: 9781621964278

Critical Gambling Studies

This article is a commentary by Sylvia Kairouz, Ph.D., written for the Critical Indigenous Gambling Studies special issue of Critical Gambling Studies.

Critical Gambling Studies, 2022

The Great Exhibition of 1851 held at the Crystal Palace in London was a showcase of the British Empire designed to demonstrate to the world Britain’s role as an industrial powerhouse. Britain was at the height of its power and the event attracted exhibits of art and colonial raw materials from around the world, but most prominently from the four corners of the British Empire. The showcase of industry and cultures of the Empire bore testament to the power of Britain and its dominion around the globe where the sun never set, and it was always over the yardarm in some corner of the empire. The essence of the Great Exhibition was to display the power of Britain by bringing the world to London. In doing so the exhibition showcased Britain as the powerhouse of the global industrial economy, and to present its citizens and the newly emerging wealthy this power through the range of the goods produced. Some one hundred and seventy years later China is now experiencing a similar boom, with the economy experiencing sustained growth and projected to overtake the US before 2030. The resulting rise in incomes lifting many out of poverty and creating a new middle class has also created an empire- sized population with money to spare, and a thirst for international travel, high end shopping, and gambling.

Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 2019

Psychology and Education Journal, 58(1), 1712 - 1717, 2021

This article would like to reflect the history of the Thai gambling industry. The nature of gambling that is hidden in tradition, opinion of Thai society towards gambling. Moreover, the effects of gambling that the state allows and does not allow through literature, law, Buddhist principles, the King's philosophy and the theoretical concept of gambling, and the theoretical concept of gambling.

In the history of Australian-Chinese relations, indeed in the history of Chinese Australia, the image of the 'New Gold Mountain' looms large. It is a trope that can also be deployed to characterise quite different phases of the connection between China and Australia. Where once Chinese peasants sought a new gold mountain in the bush lands of Australia, today Australian governments and entrepreneurs seek to build a new gold mountain through selling to China the raw materials and the 'tertiary services' of a prosperous country seeking to capitalise on the newly minted billions of the Chinese middle classes. The historical ironies born of these changes are many. In this paper I pay attention to one. Consistent with the continuing globalisation of gambling, Australian investors and governments are these days courting the high-rollers, the VIP clients ready to spend very large amounts of money on the gaming tables of luxury casinos. In turn, Australian casino resort development is becoming an opportunity of interest to Chinese investors. I note some of the current evidence for the extent and impact of these phenomena. In a historical reflection I then consider the phenomenon of the Chinese gambler at an earlier moment in Australian history, as an element in the cultural history of Australian attitudes to China, and as an ingredient of legal and political histories of the Chinese experience in colonial Australia. In attending to these stories, I will be suggesting that the scope of 'cultural relations' might fruitfully be expanded to capture the banal as well as the elevated dimensions of culture.

Global Gambling: Cultural Perspectives on Gambling Organisations, 2010

Recognition of the central role of the economy in cultural theory is widespread (duGay & Pryke, 2002; Morris, 1992; Pemberton, 1994; Zeilzer, 2001). Less accepted is the constitutive role of gambling in shaping cultural meanings and practices regarded as broadly economic. This may be because gambling is uniquely ambivalent, destabilizing oppositions between work and play, business and pleasure, investment and consumption from which both culture and economy derive their meaning as related, yet distinct, spheres. As cultural meanings and uses of the ‘economy’ have shifted with neoliberal regimes of governmentality, so too have meanings and uses attached to gambling. As an integral component of global economic flows, gambling has played and continues to play a formative role in shaping local and national cultures in many parts of the world. This chapter aims to both illuminate and unsettle a cultural tension in Australian public discourse between statements such as ‘we are a nation of gamblers’ on the one hand, and ‘problem gambling is a national scourge’ on the other. The intersection of these statements marks a site of ambivalence where several questions are raised.

Global commercial gambling has grown to be an industry of remarkable size and power. Over the past decade, global gambling losses have risen from approximately $250 billion USD in 2003 to $450 billion in 2013. No longer is gambling low-key and small-scale, the differentiated expression of local cultures. It is a global economic project, one central to the liberalisation of markets associated with the emergence of the international consumer society. We argue that that the emergence of ‘Big Gambling,’ the industry-state gambling complex, is both exemplary and symptomatic of the concentration of capital and political power among an economic elite in the Western World since the 1980s. Rather than reflecting changing patterns in consumer demand, Big Gambling is driven by political processes and economic imperatives. It has inserted dangerous commodities en masse into vulnerable communities in ways that parallels the actions of both Big Alcohol and Big Tobacco, with similarly damaging consequences. To make this case, we outline of the growth and consequences of the gambling industry in Australia. We choose Australia as our case study, not only because it has formed the context for our own research efforts, but also because of its unprecedented rate and degree of gambling liberalisation, particularly through electronic gambling machines (EGMs), the Australian-variant of the slot machine.

Canadian Journal of Sociology, 2012