Emma Casey

Domesticating gambling: gender, caring and the UK National Lottery

Abstract The issue of gambling as a form of leisure practice has, to date, received very little attention from sociologists. This is despite the enormous range of consideration recently invested in gambling by policy makers, politicians, journalists, psychologists and economists. In particular, the role that gambling plays as an important part of women’s leisure patterns has been virtually ignored. In this paper, the impact of UK National Lottery play on women’s everyday leisure experiences is examined. A questionnaire was administered to a diverse group of 150 women, and 15 women from this sample volunteered to take part in in‐depth interviews. The questionnaires sought to produce a database of the frequency of lottery play, the types of games played and the amounts of money gambled. The interviews focused on individual experiences, meanings and perceptions of lottery play as a form of leisure. The quantitative and qualitative findings of the research are discussed in terms of the material and ideological constraints shaping women’s everyday experiences of leisure, and also in terms of the ways in which gender and ‘caring’ are reproduced through women’s National Lottery play. It examines the ways in which the lottery addresses a lack of time and space for women’s pursuit of leisure.

working class women, gambling and the dream of happiness

This paper offers an account of the relationship between gender, class and notions of happiness. It draws on recent research conducted into the experiences of working class women who play the UK National Lottery. In particular, it explores the notion that gambling offers working class women the opportunity to dream of the ‘good life’ – of enhancing their lives and of making ‘improvements’ to their own and their families’ well-being. In this paper, the discourse of happiness will be examined, and the tacit assumption that working class women in particular are prone to turning to gambling as a last ditch attempt to personal and emotional fulfilment will be challenged. The paper argues that developing understandings of culture and consumption practices is imperative for producing a more complex understanding of the subjective realities of working class womens everyday lives. By engaging with feminist accounts of respectability, daydream and fantasy, the paper will present a thorough exploration of National Lottery play in working class womens everyday experiences of happiness.

'Urban Safaris': looting, consumption and exclusion in London 2011

This paper examines the prevalence and relevance of looting for understanding the 2011 English riots. It begins by distinguishing these riots from previous British riots by arguing that although looting is by no means a new phenomena looting nevertheless became central to discussions, interpretations and recollections of the riots. The paper will explore public and media responses to the looting and will focus on the uses of looting as a means of identifying a feral underclass of people seen to be morally and culturally separate from mainstream society. By unpicking the relationships between looting and what currently stands for ‘consumer culture’, the paper will argue that looting is seen as the lowest common denominator of mob behaviour since its focus is deemed to be entirely apolitical. The paper will look towards current understandings of consumer culture to try to make sense of the looting. It will argue that whilst there is now a good deal of literature exploring the relationships between judgments of taste and the reproduction of existing class structures and barriers, there is virtually nothing examining the relationships between consumption and social exclusion. I will argue in this paper that exclusion is crucial in providing a comprehensive understanding of the looting. In particular, I suggest that Bourdieusian accounts of the effects of popular expressions of disgust at the looters can offer only a partial understanding of the looting, since they do not explain the strength of desire for consumer goods. In order to address this, the paper expands on cultural capital discourses by incorporating the concept of ‘emotional capital’ into the analysis. The paper concludes by arguing that we should not be surprised by the widespread looting that took place in August 2011 given that advanced consumer society is characterised by common feelings and emotions and that many of the looters were not part of the original riots but opportunists who took advantage of the lack of police presence.

“How do you ge a PhD in that?!”: using feminist epistemologies to research the lives of working class women

This article represents an attempt to uncover a suitable method of sociological enquiry, which can best understand and explore the experiences of the older, working class women of my research. Noting the historical, frustrating sense of absence of women in dominant knowledge claims (for example Beauvoir, 1997; Woolf, 1993; Rowbotham, 1973), the article seeks to complement post‐modern critiques of the autonomy of reason with feminist accounts of knowledge or “epistemologies”. The article documents the dislocation between my own epistemological assumptions and the women’s ways of knowing, and their attempts to defend themselves against my middle class interpretations of their working class lives. It offers a reflexive account of my own ethnographic research experiences, in order to help resolve some of the practical dilemmas faced by feminist researchers (Ribbens and Edwards, 1988). The article highlights some of the pains and pleasures of the feminist research experience.

Struggle and protest or passivity and control? The formation of class identity in two contemporary cultural practices

This article draws on recent theoretical developments within sociology which have proposed new ways of looking at and understanding class. Drawing on two contemporary examples, namely the Gambling Bill and the recent ‘riots’ at Ikea in Edmonton in north London, the article demonstrates some of the ways in which class operates subjectively within the practice of everyday life. Using these examples, I show how class continuously informs identity and how, by looking at a range of contemporary cultural consumption practices, it is possible to gain a sense of how boundaries surrounding rights to middle-class identity are constantly tightened and refined. By presenting a range of responses to these consumer practices, I show how representations of the working class are often problematic and leave important questions about the everyday performance of class unanswered. The article thus offers an alternative understanding of class to those that have often positioned the working class as a dangerous deviant mob, as romantic rebels or simply as victims of an oppressive capitalist state. It concludes by arguing in favour of a renewed sociology of class and for ensuring that class features more prominently on the sociology of consumption agenda.

Catalogue communities: Work and consumption in the UK catalogue industry

This article offers a sociological understanding of the role of catalogue shopping in women’s everyday lives. The article draws on qualitative data generated from interviews with women working at the returns department of the Kays catalogue warehouse in Worcester. During the time of writing, Shop Direct, owners of Kays closed down the historic warehouse in Worcester, effectively bringing over 200 years of Worcester’s association with Kays and the catalogue industry to an end, and leading to 500 job losses, including those of the women taking part in the research. Once the largest private employer in Worcester, Kays occupies an important role in local cultural and social identities, and in this article, I will argue that a sociological account of catalogue shopping is apt and timely given such significant social changes, the recent economic downturn and social problems that have long been associated with this form of consumption. In addition, the article will show that to date, much research into catalogue shopping has tended to rest on economic historical accounts of the ‘mail order’ industry. In contrast, this article argues that catalogue shopping occupies not only a significant place in the popular cultural imagination surrounding the shopping habits of the working classes (and especially working-class women) but has also played a crucial role in women’s management of the home, caring for the family and safeguarding an often limited financial budget. The article will consider the important role that catalogues have played in offering credit to working-class women who may have previously struggled to get this. Finally, it adds to recent attempts to put women’s domestic consumption patterns firmly on the academic agenda.

Intimacies, Critical Consumption and Diverse Economies

This collection explores the relationships between the emotional and material, engaging with and developing the debates surrounding the emotional and material labour involved in producing and reproducing domestic and intimate spaces. The contributions examine the geographies and spaces of consumption in international and local-global spheres.

'Mass gambling' from 1947 to 2011: controversies and pathologies

This paper explores the relationship between Mass Observation and sociological method. It will demonstrate that often this relationship has been an uneasy one with the detailed, deeply qualitative and broadly ‘unstructured’ data elicited by Mass Observation frequently positioned as posing problems for sociologists particularly in terms of data analysis and interpretation. The paper will explore these debates by focusing on two case studies drawn from Mass Observation directives. The first will draw on the 1947 gambling study which was commissioned by the social reformer Seebohm Rowntree and his collaborator Commander G.R. Lavers and the second will draw on the 2011 ‘Gambling and Households’ directive. These case studies have been chosen because they help to illuminate the complexities of the concerns surrounding the sociological uses of Mass Observation. The paper will draw on correspondence between Rowntree, Lavers and co-founder of Mass Observation Tom Harrisson in 1947 which uncovers fascinating detail about Harrisson and Rowntrees shared commitment to revealing information about the everyday experiences and practices of working class life, but also some interesting disparities about what ‘sociological data’ might look like and what its purpose ought to be. The second case study draws on findings from the 2011 Gambling and Households directive. This directive offers an interesting historical comparison with the 1947 data. It flags up similarities particularly in terms of the moral framing of gambling, social attitudes to gambling pathologies and addictions and discourses about spending and winning money but also some notable differences particularly with regards to class identification and gambling. Each of these similarities and differences will be explored with the intention of demonstrating the particular uses of Mass Observation in uncovering the frequently overlooked and subjective patterns of intimacy.

Home as leisure space

To date, much research has overlooked the importance of the home as space for the pursuit and facilitating of leisure. This is surprising, given the wealth of data that demonstrate that the majority of leisure practice in contemporary developed societies is indeed home based. This article presents some of this data and demonstrates that the wealth of definitions of what constitutes ‘leisure’ might help to illuminate the particular relationship between leisure practice and domestic, private spheres.