Kerry G.E. Chambers, Gambling for Profit: Lotteries, Gaming Machines, and Casinos in Cross-National Focus

Abstract

Kerry G.E. Chambers, for Profit: Lotteries, Gaming Machines, and Casinos in Cross-National Focus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011, 298 pp. Hardcover (978-1-4426-4189-1) While gambling expansion can be seen as another product of the consumer society broadly speaking, the legalization and expansion of gambling over the last forty years is telling as an expression of globalization and the responses by states and corporations to social and shifts in late modern societies. One of the more interesting features of contemporary legalized gambling is its role in many jurisdictions as revenue delivery mechanism for the state. However, the expansion of gambling globally must be viewed in terms of a variety of factors--social, cultural, and political-economic, that either allow various gambling forms to emerge and gain legitimacy, or that constrain them. These factors are the focus of Kerry Chambers' for Profit, a cross-national examination of the processes of legalization, legitimation, and adoption of three gambling forms, namely, casinos, lotteries, and gaming machines outside casinos (GMOCs) in Australia, the US, and Canada. To buffer the comparative approach, we also learn about features of gambling expansion in twenty-three other countries. Certainly, as the author notes, the task is ambitious. It must be said at the outset, however, that such an approach is needed as there has been a relative dearth of comparative studies in the field of gambling studies. for Profit draws upon an array of theoretical perspectives in sociology and political science, and utilizes a wide range of source materials to present its comparative cases. The sociological reader will detect an implicit Weberian orientation throughout, insofar as the author wants to get past one-sided or universal for the emergence of the global gambling phenomenon. By this, the author means explanations that have emphasized political economy to the exclusion of other factors, particularly those arising with the sociocultural realm. Further, the theme of legitimacy is central to the book. The discussion utilizes the concept of habitus, and signals its importance for gambling legitimacy in the different jurisdictions; the analysis of the attempts by governments and other interests to alter the symbolic meaning of gambling in order to gain public support for adoption, though, suggests that symbolic struggles and violence might also have been useful concepts. Chambers' approach lends itself to Bourdieuian field analysis. The author points out that the dominant explanations for the spread of legal gambling have been political-economic. There are some good reasons for this, as the author's own evidence demonstrates: in most cases, despite differences in timing and the unevenness of development, gambling adoption has occurred as a consequence of downturns and fiscal crises in the jurisdictions studied. However, recourse to the political-economic realm alone sidesteps the important role of the socio-cultural realm, which interacts with the former to shape the possibilities for gambling adoption in the different jurisdictions. There are a number of cultural factors that come into play, such as: religion, traditions of gambling, attitudes toward gambling, crime and attitudes toward it, and political traditions. Further, as Chambers argues, culture itself is a central driver of late modern capitalism, and gambling itself is an economic 'linchpin' (p. 109). The discussion of the technological development, rationalization, and expansion of gaming machines (the McDonaldization of gambling ... predate[s] the fast food chain by decades p. 142) is particularly salient on this point. The discussions of type of polity in the chapter on Gambling for Profit in the Welfare Regimes, drawing upon Esping-Anderson's typology of welfare regimes (liberal, liberal-corporatist, corporatist, social democratic), are important for framing the political-economic contexts and the types of gambling policy and enterprises that emerge. …