GAMSOC · Gambling in Europe

This project uses an innovative anthropological approach to study gambling as a social and cultural activity, and uses these findings to establish a new research paradigm that is technologically astute, internationally focused and aggressively future oriented. Gambling in Europe is worth an estimated E89billion and is a rapidly expanding and changing industry. It is also a source of concern to legislators and consumers. Gambling legislation is not harmonised at the European level. National governments are currently moving at varying speedsbetween containment and revenue generation, driven on by operators who use constantly evolving technology to create new markets and exploit loopholes in existing ad hoc and obsolete legislation. Like legislators, the research community has failed to keep pace with these changes and continues to focus on quantifying and categorising gamblers and gambling activities within national boundaries. This project will craft a more critical and powerful alternative. Highly productive and proven anthropological approaches will be applied to foursystematically integrated case studies: the UK remote gambling industry, spread betting among Chinese financial services workers in Europe, land based gaming in Cyprus and gamblers and non-gamblers in the Italo-Slovenian borderlands. The project will establish the value of a systematic ethnographic approach to gambling by conducting research in a number of contrasting settings, across a number ofdifferent scales. It will produce high quality and robust data that will form the basis of a new research paradigm that matches the dynamism and internationalism of the European gambling industry today.