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Sports gambling has a very long history, evolving with and influencing cultures, classes, genders and races from antiquity until the present. Attempts to ban it have failed, with its problems regularly emerging in new forms. Given the still limited historiography, this chapter adopts a broad-brush, qualitative, socio-historical approach. It focuses on five themes: the change over time in the various sports betting systems, such as lotteries; the changing nature of social networks in terms of sports gambling; anti-gambling attitudes and their importance in shaping legislative attempts to control or suppress it; the changing regulation of sports betting; and the way identities such as class, age and gender impacted on sports gambling.

The rapid expansion of the Canadian gambling industry since 1969 has generated substantial profits for provincial governments and industry operators. As gambling expands its reach and regulatory structures evolve, a growing body of researchers is starting to scrutinize the industry and its socio‐economic impacts on Canadians. This article provides background information on Canada's gambling industry and presents an overview of essential information resources.

The potential for substantial revenues from gaming has moved gambling from an underworld activity to a legitimate mainstream business. This selective list of portals, Web sites, and print resources is intended to guide local communities, librarians, and researchers to a variety of sources (statistics, regulations, history, and industry trends) focused on the business of gaming.

The purpose of this paper is to deal with the issue of market redefinition through an examination of a unique industry that has met with multiple obstacles: online gambling. The main research question is how markets get redefined when quantum technological change occurs, despite the lack of formal support and a highly fragmented industry structure, typical in online industries.

This industry lends itself to the analysis because of the intense competition for reconstruction of the field among state powers, professional associations, and global forces. The paper provides an archival and qualitative overview of the industry and identify the various forces competing for dominance in the market. It examines the competing logics in this industry and identify the sources and implications of such competition for emerging markets.

Both broad and specific contributions of this paper are discussed, namely the important role of professional and interest associations in industries without clear geographical boundaries, as well as the growing role for global moderating agencies.

The paper provides a timely example of the ways in which firms organize in the modern business environment. In addition, it discusses the volatile and complex power structure in a global economy. While the research is necessarily processual and does not provide for multiple settings, the extent of legal implications here can be generalized to much smaller differences in global markets.

This paper provides support for the idea that, contrary to many concepts of industry acceptance and growth, legitimacy is not a requisite condition for an industry to prosper.

This study investigates how employees perceive responsible gambling (RG) programs, which are part of a corporate social responsibility (CSR) framework for minimizing negative impacts associated with problematic gambling. Casino employees have different levels of interaction with gamblers, which could affect employees' opinions about RG.

Surveys at two time periods – baseline (N = 2,192) and one-year follow-up (N = 852) to a new RG program – asked employees at MGM Resorts International (MGM) about their (1) perceptions of program effectiveness, (2) gambling behaviors and beliefs and (3) perceived level of employer support. Two one-way MANCOVAs, with years employed in the gambling industry as the covariate, extended results from a prior study. An additional two-way MANCOVA examined contact-level and year-over-year differences.

Employees who have high contact with gamblers, such as those in security or casino dealer positions, viewed RG programs as less effective than employees who have low contact with gamblers, such as those in culinary or corporate positions.

Employees are vital to harm reduction CSR strategies and MGM should work toward a program with varied RG training content and delivery, depending on the likelihood of employee interaction with active gamblers.

RG programs are key CSR initiatives for hospitality organizations with gambling licenses. Employees play an interactive role in delivering these programs, so their perceptions and understanding help assess program value. This is the first study to examine employee perceptions of a newly-implemented RG program with baseline and follow-up data.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how responsible gambling policies are communicated and presented as a legitimation strategy to different stakeholders.

This study is based primarily on 49 semi-structured interviews with internal and external stakeholders of Macao’s gambling industry in 2011. This study draws on Reast et al.’s (2012) legitimacy-seeking strategy framework.

The findings indicate that these organisations use construing and earning legitimacy strategies to ensure passive support and acquiescence from certain stakeholder groups, and they deploy bargaining and capturing legitimacy strategies to generate active support for this morally contested industry. As a means of attaining long-standing legitimacy in the industry, gambling operators engage symbolically rather than substantively in responsible gambling to minimise the legitimacy gap.

The findings of the study pertain to a unique setting and might not be suitable for generalisation.

In the absence of stringent legal mechanisms and strong external stakeholder pressure, the 12th Five-Year Plan of the People’s Republic of China aims to transform Macao into a “World Centre of Tourism and Leisure”, and gambling companies may soon face much stronger pressures from the Chinese Government and the Macao Government.

Voluntary responsible gambling initiatives are liable to be used only in symbolic fashion, without offering genuine engagement or full commitment to the most vulnerable stakeholder group.

This study contributes to the literature on social and accounting literature by providing an in-depth case study of how organisations in the gambling industry use different communication strategies to shape and respond to controversial issues.

This paper aims to explore the adoption of cashless, card‐based gaming machine payment systems from the organisational perspective, with an emphasis on the role of employees as change agents.

In a qualitative research approach, semi‐structured interviews with 14 registered club employees or change agents form the basis of analysis.

A typology of change agent involvement in the successful customer adoption of payment innovations is proposed. Agents' capacity to recognise and respond to customer needs is the first theme identified and discussed. An ability to reflect on the effect of customer adoption of cashless mechanisms on their role and responsibilities constitutes the second skill, and their perception of the consequences of use for the organisation and its customers represents the highest order change agent skill in the adoption process.

The exploratory nature of this qualitative study limits the generalisability of the findings to gaming machine venues that share similar contextual features.

The club employees interviewed are found to be potentially effective agents of change who readily observe and respond to the needs of gambling customers and can relate these to specific operational impacts. Opportunities for genuine employee participation in the diffusion process beyond the communication and adoption stages would, it is concluded, improve outcomes in the rate of adoption, range of customer use and the process of product development and enhancement.

This paper applies a typology of change agent roles in a service industry context, acknowledging the unique relationship that club employees have with customers. It highlights how this can be leveraged to improve new product development and customer adoption.

Gambling has been a part of the human experience for a long time, perhaps as long as humans have interacted socially. Its literature has been accumulating since ancient times, with references found in some of the earliest records. Throughout history gambling has had a bad reputation because of the multitude of social problems attributed to it. The gambling industry today refers to the activity as “gaming,” which does not sound quite as notorious.

Trauma and adverse childhood events are found in the pre‐immigration histories of a cohort of four Chinese Canadian pathological gamblers. The nature of their traumatic experiences, consisting of loss and abandonment, neglect and deprivation, physical and emotional abuse, socioeconomic and political oppression, is elucidated and described. The impact of pre‐immigration trauma and its relationship to the development of pathological gambling post‐immigration are discussed. Upon further corroboration of the existence of pre‐immigration trauma among Chinese and Asian immigrants in future studies, training of counsellors to incorporate an in‐depth pre‐immigration history in the assessment and treatment protocol of immigrants manifesting pathological gambling is recommended.

Elazar’s typology of political cultures is examined. From his categorization of jurisdictions with aspects of 'moralistic' political cultures, five are selected: Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, Connecticut, and France. Their recent political history is examined and it is demonstrated that these 'moralistic' type polities have abandoned policies which formerly condemned or at least contained legalized gambling. Instead each has responded to commercial pressures for expanded gambling. The reasons why ‘moralistic’ values in making decisions in this arena have been cast aside are examined. The reasons include an international cross-polity homogenization of political cultures, a blurring of the meaning of ‘moralistic’ in today’s politics, and above all, severe economic crises that take precedence over other values.