Ladbrokes Life: Gambling Identities and Deviant Leisure

• In Event: Deviant Leisure and Consumer Culture

Abstract

While once subject to wide-ranging state control (Banks, 2013), gambling has successfully culturally embedded itself within the normalised and legitimised forms of leisure such as the night-time economy, sports fandom, and online forums of socialisation. This is reflected in numerous sports-betting company commercials which visually situate gambling within a wider masculine weekend leisure experience of football, a flutter, and beer at the pub or at home with friends. Based upon our on-going ethnographic research, the experience of casual-yet-consistent betting is an integral aspect to leisure identities and new masculinities. Gambling within broader circuits of leisure and consumption is imbued with more than the simple outcome of winning or losing. Rather, the act of betting becomes irretrievably entangled with identity, with betting ‘styles’ or approaches having the potential to act as a reflective mirror of who they are.

This paper, while drawing upon on-going ethnographic research, takes the popular ‘Ladbrokes Life’ commercials as its starting point and is analysed through a deviant leisure perspective. It explores the multitude of harms associated with the attachment of gambling to identity within the wider social and economic contexts of late-capitalism, consumer culture, cool individualism, and a culture of indebtedness. It argues that an identity-based culture of sports betting that attaches fragile and facile social and cultural capital to the allure of the gambling win encourages the chasing of losses and impulsive betting. Underscored by readily available credit through an array of high-interest payday loans, the overt-yet-surreptitious entrenchment of gambling within new leisure masculinities has the potential to cast these young people into a new and difficult reality of indebtedness. The peaks and troughs of winning and losing, against the background of the 'objectless' anxiety of late-capitalism (Hall and Winlow, 2015), perpetuates a leisure culture which, while culturally normalised, is characterised by the harms of stress, financial uncertainty, domestic instability, emotional volatility, depression and anxiety.

Author

• Thomas Raymen, Plymouth University