The Sociology of Risk and Gambling Reader

James Cosgrave

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780415952217
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136747670
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

This reader contributes to the sociology of gambling, and offers a variety of sociological approaches, ranging from classical sociological analyses of gambling to contemporary sociological approaches to risk.

SECTION 1

Sociological Approaches to Risk and Gambling

Introduction

This section begins with sociological formulations of risk from the leading exponents of the risk perspective(s), Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck. For both, risk comes to be a defining feature and mode of institutional orientation in high (Giddens) or second modernity (Beck). For Giddens, the achieved characteristics of “ontological security” are brought to the fore for individuals who can no longer rely on the traditional institutional moorings of self-identity that are weakening in high modernity. Individuals, under modern risk conditions, come to rely on abstract systems of expert knowledge in order to find their bearings. High modernity reveals tensions between societal interests in safety and the removal of risks on the one hand, and the valorization of “cultivated risk-taking” on the other. In his formulations of the significance of risk for self-identity, Giddens draws upon Goffmanian concepts such as fatefulness and consequentiality (see Goffman, Chapter Twelve).

For Beck, second modernity (also “world risk society”) is characterized by the processes of “reflexive modernization,” whereby the rational assumptions and orientations of modern institutions and their management—predicated on a “logic of control”—are confronted by the risks produced by these very institutions. Beck's piece seeks to open up the ways in which the societal orientations to, and consequences of, risk are reshaping (second) modern institutions and political processes. Beck's analysis of the processes of individualization (see Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002) resembles Giddens's notion of the “disembedding” of individuals from traditional institutions, which prompts actors to come to define their biographies for themselves (Giddens 1991). A theme that emerges from the analyses of both thinkers concerns the social basis of trust, since uncertainty comes to be a defining characteristic in the cultural life of late/second modernity.

Deborah Lupton provides an introductory article on the governmentality approach to risk. This approach, which derives from the later work of Michel Foucault (1991), examines the ways in which individuals and populations are governed in modern society. These modes of governing extend beyond the “formal realm of the state … and refer in an extended way to the range of practices that seek to regulate individual and collective conduct through various institutions, discourses, rules, norms and practices” (Slater and Tonkiss 2001, 145). From a governmentality perspective, “risk may be understood as a regulatory power by which populations and individuals are monitored and managed through the goals of neo-liberalism” (Lupton 87). A feature of neo-liberalism concerns the ways in which individuals are encouraged to govern themselves through practices of selfmonitoring and regulation. The governmentality approach is utilized and developed by Collins in his discussion of the governing of the “pathological gambler” (Chapter Seventeen) and could also be further utilized to discuss the governing of non-problem gambling citizens within the contemporary climate of gambling legitimation and expansion in North America and elsewhere. This approach also provides a different way of thinking about risk; where Giddens and Beck speak of social conditions that produce disembedding and individualization, governmentality views risks within neoliberal societies as entailing particular governing strategies directed at the conduct of individuals.

In 1976, the authors of a British study of gambling, Gambling, Work and Leisure: A Study Across Tree Areas, remarked at the beginning of the first chapter, “Gambling as a Sociological Problem,” that “there have been remarkably few sociological attempts to account for gambling,” and that this constituted a “strange gap in sociological accounting” (Downes et al. 1976, 11). While much social scientific work has been written on gambling since then (see, for example, Eadington 1976, 1997; Clotfelter and Cook 1989; Fabian 1990; McMillen 1996; Castellani 2000; Reith 2003), this gap remains within sociology, considering that legalized gambling has expanded rapidly in Canada, the United States, Australia, Britain, and other countries, particularly since the early 1990s. Gerda Reith's The Age of Chance: Gambling and Western Culture and Mikal Aasvad's The Sociology of Gambling (2003) signal a burgeoning sociological and cultural interest in the study of gambling, and a strong interest has developed in Australia where gambling is a vital aspect of the culture—McMillen's Gambling Cultures: Studies in History and Interpretation (1996) is an excellent multidisciplinary and international contribution. But as McMillen notes, echoing the views of Downes et al., “Tere … are significant empirical and theo-retical gaps in gambling research which have not been addressed: gam-bling in modern Asian cultures has rarely been studied; and the theories of signification and power deriving from Barthes … and Foucault … and the broad area of women's studies provide fertile sources for further insight and stimulation” (32). The governmentality approach, represented in this volume by the readings of Lupton (Chapter Tree) and Collins (Chapter Seventeen), demonstrate Foucault's infuence.

While the gap in gambling accounts is narrowing, it continues to persist in analyses from feminist, cultural studies, and sociological perspectives. Notwithstanding the important contributions of Gambling Cultures to gambling analysis, the first chapter of the Downes book remains in many ways a benchmark for a specifically sociological analysis of gambling. While much has changed in the culture of legal gambling since the 1970s, the piece nevertheless provides an overview of the major issues involved with gambling as a sociological phenomenon, and draws upon diverse theoretical resources in the account. Particularly interesting is their use of Caillois's and Goffman's work, the latter of which is included here (Chapter Twelve).

References

Aasvad, Mikal (2003) The Sociology of Gambling. Springfield, IL: Charles C Tomas.

Beck, Ulrich, and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim (2002) Individualization. London: Sage.

Clotfelter, Charles T., and Phillip J. Cook (1989) Selling Hope: State Lotteries in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Downes, David, B. P. Davies, M. E. David, and P. Stone (1976) “Gambling as a Sociological Problem,” in Gambling, Work and Leisure: A Study Across Tree Areas, 11–28. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Eadington, William R., ed. (1976) Gambling and Society: Interdisciplinary Studies on the Subject of Gambling. Springfield, IL: Charles C Tomas.

Eadington, William R., and Judy Cornelius, eds. (1997) Gambling: Public Policies and the Social Sciences. Reno: University of Nevada.

Fabian, Ann (1990) Card Sharps, Dream Books & Bucket Shops: Gambling in 19th-Century America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Foucault, Michel (1991) “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Giddens, Anthony (1991) Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

McMillen, Jan, ed. (1996) Gambling Cultures: Studies in History and Interpretation. London: Routledge.

Reith, Gerda, ed. (2003) Gambling: Who Wins? Who Loses? Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Slater, Don, and Fran Tonkiss (2001) Market Society: Markets and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.

CHAPTER 1

Fate, Risk and Security

ANTHONY GIDDENS

Fate, Fatalism, Fateful Moments

To live in the universe of high modernity is to live in an environment of chance and risk, the inevitable concomitants of a system geared to the domination of nature and the reflexive making of history. Fate and destiny have no formal part to play in such a system, which operates (as a matter of principle) via what I shall call open human control of the natural and social worlds. Te universe of future events is open to be shaped by human intervention—within limits which, as far as possible, are regulated by risk assessment. Yet the notions of fate and destiny have by no means disappeared in modern societies, and an investigation into their nature is rich with implications for the analysis of modernity and self-identity

Sweeping though the assertion may be, it can be said with some confidence that there is no non-modern culture which does not in some sense incorporate, as a central part of its philosophy, the notions of fate and destiny. Te world is not seen as a directionless swirl of events, in which the only ordering agents are natural laws and human beings, but as having intrinsic form which relates individual life to cosmic happenings. A person's destiny—the direction his or her life is due to take—is specifed by that person's fate, what the future holds in store. Although there is an enormous variety of beliefs which could be grouped under these two terms, in most of them the connecting point between destiny and fate is death. In Greek thought, fate (moira) was the bringer of doom and death, and was thought of as a great power—more ancient than the oldest gods.¹

Given the nature of modern social life and culture, we tend now to counterpose fate and the openness of future events. Fate is taken to mean a form of preordained determinism, to which the modern outlook stands opposed. Yet while the concept of fate does have the connotation of a partly ‘settled’ future, it typically also involves a moral conception of destiny and an esoteric view of daily events—where ‘esoteric’ means that events are experienced not just in terms of their causal relation to one another, but in terms of their cosmic meaning. Fate in this sense has little connection with fatalism, as this term is ordinarily understood today. Fatalism is the refusal of modernity—a repudiation of a controlling orientation to the future in favour of an attitude which lets events come as they will.

A main connecting point between pre-existing ideas of fate and those of the post-medieval period was the concept of fortuna, which originally derived from the name of the Roman goddess of ‘fortune’, and came into uneasy tension with the dominant Christian beliefs. The idea of Divine Providence was clearly a version of fate but, as Max Weber pointed out, Christianity introduced a more dynamic role for human beings on this earth than was characteristic of the traditional religions of Greece and Rome.² The goddess was frowned on by the Church, since the idea of ‘fortune’ implied that one could achieve grace without having to work as God's instrument in the world. Yet the idea of fortuna remained important and often outweighed providential reward in the afterlife as a feature of local cultural belief. Machiavelli's use of fortuna marked a significant transition between the traditional use of the notion and the emergence of new modes of social activity from which fate is excluded. In The Prince he says:

Many have held, and still hold the opinion that the things of this world are, in a manner, controlled by fortuna and by God, that men in their wisdom cannot control them, and, on the contrary, that men can have no remedy whatsoever for them; and for this reason they might judge that they need not sweat much over such matters but let them be governed by fate…. I judge it to be true that fortuna is the arbiter of one half of our actions, but that she still leaves the control of the other half, or almost that, to us … I say that one sees a prince prosper today and come to ruin tomorrow without having seen him change his character or any of his traits … a prince who relies completely upon fortune will come to ruin as soon as she changes; I also believe that the man who adapts his course of action to the nature of the times will succeed and, likewise, that the man who sets his course of action out of tune with the times will come to grief.³

It is not surprising that the study of politics should provide the initial area within which notions of fate become transformed, for although the propaganda of nations may see them as driven by fate to a specific destiny, the practice of politics—in the modern context—presumes the art of conjecture. Tinking how things might turn out if a given course of action is followed, and balancing this against alternatives, is the essence of political judgement. Machiavelli is celebrated as the originator of modern political strategy, but his work gives voice to some rather more fundamental innovations. He foreshadows a world in which risk, and risk calculation, edge aside fortuna in virtually all domains of human activity. There seems to have been no generic word for risk in Machiavelli's time, however; the notion appears in European thought about a century later. (In English until the nineteenth century the word was usually spelled in its French version, as risqué. For some while the French spelling continued to be used alongside the new Anglicised word, which was first of all employed with reference to insurance. The term risqué, meaning a joke that risks giving oftence, still retains the old form.)⁴

The notion of risk becomes central in a society which is taking leave of the past, of traditional ways of doing things, and which is opening itself up to a problematic future. This statement applies just as much to institutionalised risk environments as to other areas. Insurance … is one of the core elements of the economic order of the modern world—it is part of a more general phenomenon concerned with the control of time which I shall term the colonisation of the future. The ‘openness’ of things to come expresses the malleability of the social world and the capability of human beings to shape the physical settings of our existence. While the future is recognised to be intrinsically unknowable, and as it is increasingly severed from the past, that future becomes a new terrain—a territory of counterfactual possibility. Once thus established, that terrain lends itself to colonial invasion through counterfactual thought and risk calculation. The calculation of risk … can never be fully complete, since even in relatively confined risk environments there are always unintended and unforeseen outcomes. In milieux from which fate has disappeared, all action, even that which sticks to strongly established patterns, is in principle ‘calculable’ in terms of risk—some sort of overall assessment of likely risks can be made for virtually all habits and activities, in respect of specific outcomes. The intrusion of abstract systems into day-to-day life, coupled with the dynamic nature of knowledge, means that awareness of risk seeps into the actions of almost everyone.

A more extended discussion of risk, and its relation to self-identity, will be given shortly. First, however, it is necessary to in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Editor's Introduction: Gambling, Risk, and Late Capitalism
• Section 1 Sociological Approaches to Risk and Gambling
• Section 2 Gambling Histories/(Sub)cultures
• Section 3 Adventure, Action, and Play: Gambling as Social Action
• Section 4 The State, Regulation, and Politics
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Permissions
• Index