Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is difficult to understand why gambling has attracted so little attention from cultural studies and feminist analysis which have made such important contributions to explanations of contemporary society since the 1980s ... The shape of modern gambling not only reflects the nature of social relations in any society, but also powerfully determines new social and political outcomes. Without grappling with these ... conceptual issues, many gambling studies remain entrapped, albeit unintentionally, within a narrow, liberal orientation which limits their concerns to descriptive analysis of the functioning of gamblers and gambling institutions. An understanding of contemporary gambling and its rapid global expansion requires different conceptual tools and a more explicitly political project. (1) Culture is a stake which, like all social stakes, simultaneously presupposes and demands that one take part in the game and be taken in by it; and interest in culture, without which there is no race, no competition, is produced by the very race and competition which it produces. The value of culture, the supreme fetish, is generated in the initial investment implied by the mere fact of entering the game, joining in the collective belief in the value of the game which makes the game and endlessly remakes the competition for the stakes. (2) This essay forms part of a larger research project titled 'Cultural Economies of Gambling' which examines the effects of public debate and research that focuses on the problematic individual gambler and problematic communities of gamblers rather than problems created by the terms on which businesses and governments with a shared commitment to implementing a neo-liberal program of social reform invest in gambling. Recognition of the central role of the 'economy' in cultural theory is widespread. (3) Less accepted is the constitutive role of gambling in shaping cultural meanings and practices regarded as broadly 'economic'. This may be because gambling is a uniquely ambivalent research object, destabilising oppositions between work and play; business and pleasure; investment and consumption from which 'culture' and 'economy' derive their meanings as related, yet distinct, spheres. My understanding of gambling's relationship to the economy as a whole is captured in Derrida's concept of the 'supplement'; that is, something that both adds to and completes the economy. As cultural meanings and uses of the 'economy' have shifted with neo-liberal configurations of governmentality, so too have meanings and uses attached to gambling. Investigating the global rise of gambling industries (facilitated in part by the development of new delivery platforms such as internet and mobile devices) (4) and associated 'problems' should therefore provide valuable insights into contemporary formations of subjectivity, value and power. While most of my research is based on Australian material, this project has a comparative dimension which focuses on the relationship between legalised gambling, Indigenous sovereignties and the racialised value of white possession in other settler-colonial nations such as Canada and the US. In this essay I demonstrate the extent to which gambling and gamblers are researched and regulated in isolation from the environments, feelings, interactions, allegiances, sights and smells that constitute gambling as a cultural domain. I examine some of the productive effects of a discourse of 'problem gambling', including the establishment and funding of services; the development of new legislation, the stigmatisation of individuals and groups and the demonisation of particular gaming technologies in popular culture. And I argue that the complicated relationships that individuals and groups have to gambling practices, regulations, environments and popular representations produce their own effects, one of which is to unsettle the boundary between the happiness of 'recreational gambling' and the unhappiness of 'problem gambling' on which neo-liberal governmentality relies. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".