Rebecca Cassidy

Fair game? Producing and publishing gambling research

This brief article reviews the findings of Fair Game (2014) and discusses their implications for journals publishing gambling research. Drawing parallels with critiques in tobacco and alcohol, it adds to the growing number of voices arguing for reform of the gambling field.

Qualitative Research in Gambling: exploring the production and consumption of risk

Gambling is both a multi-billion dollar international industry and a ubiquitous social and cultural phenomenon. It is also undergoing significant change, with new products and technologies, regulatory models, changing public attitudes and the sheer scale of the gambling enterprise necessitating innovative and mixed methodologies that are flexible, responsive and ‘agile’. This book seeks to demonstrate that researchers should look beyond the existing disciplinary territory and the dominant paradigm of ‘problem gambling’ in order to follow those changes across territorial, political, technical, regulatory and conceptual boundaries. The book draws on cutting-edge qualitative work in disciplines including anthropology, history and media studies to explore the production and consumption of risk, risky places, risk technology, the gambling industry, and connections between gambling and other kinds of speculation such as financial derivatives. In doing so it addresses some of the most important issues in contemporary social science, including the challenges of studying deterritorialised social phenomena; globalizing technologies and local markets; regulation as it operates across local, regional and international scales; globalization, and the rise of games, virtual worlds, and social media.

The Social Practice of Racehorse Breeding

This paper suggests that the stories that thoroughbred breeders tell about racehorse reproduction can contribute to an understanding of their ideas about relatedness between humans. It examines the thoroughbred pedigree as it is presented in the English sales catalogue as a locus of complex ideas about heredity, fer tility, and procreation. It argues that resistance within the industry to new reproductive technologies, including arti�cial insemination, can be understood in terms of ideas about relatedness between horses and, by implication, between people.This paper is based upon extensive par ticipant observation conducted within the horseracing industry based in the town of Newmarket, England.

Gambling as exchange: horserace betting in London

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the growing body of research which uses qualitative approaches to investigate gambling as it occurs within particular networks or social milieu. Using data gathered in betting shops in London between 2006 and 2009 the paper presents gambling as exchange and gamblers as fractal persons. This approach is used to explore changes in the meanings attributed to gambling by betting shop staff and customers under various regulatory conditions. Research participants portrayed betting that took place on the street with illegal bookmakers before 1961 as a form of circulation within their community and contrasted this with betting in licensed offices as an extractive process. The paper contributes to a more general discussion about the use of long term participant observation to study gambling as a social process.

‘Nothing can be done until everything is done’: the use of complexity arguments by food, beverage, alcohol and gambling industries

Background Corporations use a range of strategies to dispute their role in causing public health harms and to limit the scope of effective public health interventions. This is well documented in relation to the activities of the tobacco industry, but research on other industries is less well developed. We therefore analysed public statements and documents from four unhealthy commodity industries to investigate whether and how they used arguments about complexity in this way. Methods We analysed alcohol, food, soda and gambling industry documents and websites and minutes of reports of relevant health select committees, using standard document analysis methods. Results Two main framings were identified: (i) these industries argue that aetiology is complex, so individual products cannot be blamed; and (ii) they argue that population health measures are ‘too simple’ to address complex public health problems. However, in this second framing, there are inherent contradictions in how industry used ‘complexity’, as their alternative solutions are generally not, in themselves, complex. Conclusion The concept of complexity, as commonly used in public health, is also widely employed by unhealthy commodity industries to influence how the public and policymakers understand health issues. It is frequently used in response to policy announcements and in response to new scientific evidence (particularly evidence on obesity and alcohol harms). The arguments and language may reflect the existence of a cross-industry ‘playbook’, whose use results in the undermining of effective public health policies – in particular the undermining of effective regulation of profitable industry activities that are harmful to the public’s health.

On gambling research, social science, and the consequences of commercial gambling

Abstract Social, political, economic, geographic and cultural processes related to the significant growth of the gambling industries have, in recent years, been the subject of a growing body of research. This body of research has highlighted relationships between social class and gambling expenditure, as well as the design, marketing and location of gambling products and businesses. It has also demonstrated the regressive nature of much gambling revenue, illuminating the influence that large gambling businesses have had on government policy and on researchers, including research priorities, agendas and outcomes. Recently, critics have contended that although such scholarship has produced important insights about the operations and effects of gambling businesses, it is ideologically motivated and lacks scientific rigour. This response explains some basic theoretical and disciplinary concepts that such critique misunderstands, and argues for the value of social, political, economic, geographic and cultural perspectives to the broader, interdisciplinary field of gambling research.

‘On the human-animal boundary’

ABSTRACT This paper considers contemporary Western attitudes towards animals. Whilst many studies of human–animal relations look backwards to the inheritance of Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes and others, this paper looks to the future. I want to suggest another batch of possibilities that may serve as resources for thinking about the apparent human–animal boundary. These possibilities include Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) / variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (νCJD), xenotransplantation and transgenic animals.

Systems Thinking as a Framework for Analyzing Commercial Determinants of Health

Policy Points: Worldwide, more than 70% of all deaths are attributable to noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), nearly half of which are premature and apply to individuals of working age. Although such deaths are largely preventable, effective solutions continue to elude the public health community. One reason is the considerable influence of the “commercial determinants of health”: NCDs are the product of a system that includes powerful corporate actors, who are often involved in public health policymaking. This article shows how a complex systems perspective may be used to analyze the commercial determinants of NCDs, and it explains how this can help with (1) conceptualizing the problem of NCDs and (2) developing effective policy interventions. Context The high burden of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) is politically salient and eminently preventable. However, effective solutions largely continue to elude the public health community. Two pressing issues heighten this challenge: the first is the public health communitys narrow approach to addressing NCDs, and the second is the involvement of corporate actors in policymaking. While NCDs are often conceptualized in terms of individual‐level risk factors, we argue that they should be reframed as products of a complex system. This article explores the value of a systems approach to understanding NCDs as an emergent property of a complex system, with a focus on commercial actors. Methods Drawing on Donella Meadowss systems thinking framework, this article examines how a systems perspective may be used to analyze the commercial determinants of NCDs and, specifically, how unhealthy commodity industries influence public health policy. Findings Unhealthy commodity industries actively design and shape the NCD policy system, intervene at different levels of the system to gain agency over policy and politics, and legitimize their presence in public health policy decisions. Conclusions It should be possible to apply the principles of systems thinking to other complex public health issues, not just NCDs. Such an approach should be tested and refined for other complex public health challenges.

Book Review: 'I Want to Know about the Dogs'

The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (hereafter CSM) is a short book and an embellishment of an argument that also appeared in 2003 in an article in Ihde and Selinger’s Chasing Technoscience and in the Haraway Reader also published in 2003 (Haraway, 2003a, 2003b; see also Haraway 2003c, 2003d). It develops certain ideas that are a constant feature of Haraway’s work, which pays serious attention to ‘entities that are neither nature nor culture’ (Markussen et al., 2003: 57), and makes use of the format that was so influential when the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ was published in 1985 (Haraway, 1991).