Gambling, Losses and Self-Esteem

This book provides new insights into contemporary betting shops. Adopting an interactionist approach, it examines the process of ‘blame-shifting’ as collective attempt to repair self-esteem in the wake of financial losses and considers the role of announcements made in betting shops in creating an atmosphere of inclusion.

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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.