Gambling and Social Theory Part 1
By James Cosgrave Department of Sociology, Trent University Durham How to cite: Cosgrave J. (2020). Gambling and Social Theory - Part 1. Critical Gambling Studies . https://doi.org/10.29173/cgs56 Gambling has had a long history characterized by periods of condemnation and widespread participation, sometimes exuberant. When David Downes and his colleagues remarked (in 1976) on the social scientific value of Erving Goffman’s (1967) analysis of gambling and action in ‘Where the Action Is’ , they said the essay ‘lifts gambling out of the moral abyss into which successive generations of commentators and reformers have consigned it and renders possible a consideration of its meaning which is freed from a priori association of a negative kind’ ( Downes et al., 1976 ). The implications of these comments would be that gambling could be analyzed, without moral condemnation, as a phenomenon in its own right. It is tempting to say that, now, in general terms given widespread legalization over