Vice or Virtue?: Regulating the Gaming Industry Across Time and Place

• In Event: Identifying and Regulating White-Collar and Corporate Crime

Abstract

By researching vice, criminologists learn about the move from a relatively simple prohibitory approach to a complicated regulatory process that that must redefine the behavior and draw new boundaries between what is legal and illegal. As behaviors become legal, a struggle ensues to determine whether they are morally acceptable and how to control potential harms. Further complicating matters is that the legalization of vice is often motivated by the state’s need to generate revenue; this produces conflict between the state’s duty to protect its populace and its desire to retain funding for programs. Gambling is a prime example of an industry that has grappled with such issues.

The current paper is a comparative historical analysis examining how gaming regulators in four jurisdictions have handled the legitimization process. Structural contradictions theory (Chambliss, 1993) serves as the theoretical framework for evaluating government strategies for balancing the desire for gaming revenue and the need to prevent harm. We argue that a Responsive Regulation approach (Ayres and Braithwaite, 1992) is the ideal regulatory strategy for negotiating such structural contradictions, and we believe this has been the implicit approach used by gaming regulators across jurisdictions.

Authors

• Melissa Rorie, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

• C.G. (Karin) van Wingerde, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam