Gambling, Losses and Self-Esteem: An Interactionist Approach to the Betting Shop (Routledge Advances in Research Methods) - Hardcover

Mc Namara, Cormac

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0367343096 ISBN 13: 9780367343095

Publisher: Routledge, 2019

Synopsis

This book provides new insights into contemporary betting shops, with a particular focus on the manner in which losing bets are dealt with by customers. Drawing on research undertaken in Ireland, it demonstrates that customers tend to shift responsibility for monetary losses onto factors external to themselves as part of a collective process engaged in to restore self-esteem, and considers the role played by announcements made in betting shops in creating an atmosphere of inclusion - and the implications of this for ‘problem gambling’. Through an analysis of newspaper representations of the first legally operating betting shops in Ireland, which opened in the 1920s, the author places the contemporary betting shop in historical context and examines trends in gambling across the British Isles with reference to social class and the security or precarity of work. An interactionist study not only of gambling but also of responsibility and the connection between the micro-world and social structures, this volume will appeal to sociologists with interests in symbolic interactionism and strategies of blame.

About this title

About the Author

Cormac Mc Namara is Lecturer in Social Science in the Faculty of Education at Northeast Normal University in China.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0367343096
• ISBN 13: 9780367343095
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 148