Abstract
In the last two decades land-based casino gambling has been established as an economic development option for societies across Europe, North America, Africa, Asia and Australasia. Jeffrey Sallaz’s book is the first major sociological study to assess how the transition, from pariah industry to this new legitimate status, was orchestrated. It is a comparative ethnographic study drawing on fieldwork in two casinos: one operating in Nevada and the other in Gauteng, South Africa. Sallaz explores the different ways in which the work, management and markets of casino gambling have been institutionalized in the two different sites.
The story told is one where the legal constraints limiting gambling in consumer markets are replaced by regulations imposed on capital and labor markets; these he shows, allow the expansion of gambling. He describes these developments as a purification process through which former pariah operators are brought into the ranks of legitimate capitalist enterprise and established firms come to view the industry as a legitimate arena for investment. For Sallaz, the story is one of symbolic politics played out differently according to the configuration of actors in local political fields. Taking his lead from Bourdieu he shows how the different political fields in Nevada and South Africa lead to different outcomes from the implementation process.
His argument turns on an ethnography of the everyday life of dealers dealing the game of blackjack. This is his entry point to the different worlds of gambling in Nevada and Guateng. As he puts it, blackjack games in two societies look identical but the action on the tables could not be more different. He establishes this by following the diverse ways in which the service encounter at the blackjack table is mediated and organized in each site. He discovers that the encounters have a history and support very different regimes of management practice.
The ethnography is written in the first-person narrative. In Nevada we follow Sallaz as he moves through training school and into his first apprenticeship on the job as a new dealer. We learn how he is constrained to establish himself as a hustling dealer, one who comes to be proud of his acquired skills. This pride in work is presented as a subjectivity that arises from a networked, horizontal form of hegemonic control that operates, paradoxically, through a combination of a lack of job security, no guaranteed shift times or benefits, long hours and minimum wages. These insecurities displace the need for managerial control on to the dealers who must learn to self-manage their emotional offerings and their influence over game outcomes so they can earn tips in order to boost minimum wages. This requires mastering the arts of withholding service from customers and altering the odds of the game. Descriptions of these arts circulate as informal codes of work through dealers’ storytelling and emphasize that, to survive, new dealers must become participants in the games they deal in as employees.
The importance of this hustling identity for Sallaz is that it offsets vertical conflict between workers and management. Management is complicit in supporting the dealers’ ‘games of work’ and this reduces the need for close and constant surveillance through the technologies of the camera and the presence of the pit boss. The dealers both monitor themselves and discipline each other as they perform for tips that are pooled with other dealers. Read this way it is not the centralized technologies of hierarchical management and the camera but the dispersed technology of the tip, facilitated by hand dealing and shuffling of the cards, that regulates work in a low roller, grind casino.
The novelty of this arrangement is that the purification process in Nevada has legitimated casino firms but left them in control of the labor market. The firms have retained and extended their traditional employment policies that rely on the recognition of informal reputation in job referral networks known as ‘juice’. The ‘juice’ is now extended beyond referrals to white workers to a multi-ethnic workforce. The traditional relations of power based on a decentralized casino operation retaining extensive powers for pit bosses and occupational skills amongst dealers have also been retained. The result is that the casino in Nevada is not a disciplinary panopticon but rather a regime of hegemonic control in which the worker adopts an entrepreneurial identity. In this regime both the power of management and the pride of the dealers emerge from the very contingency, flexibility and mobility of the employment conditions of the dealers.
In the casino in Gauteng, Sallaz experiences a very different form of hierarchical management that he refers to as despotic. In this regime he is constrained to erase his self-presentation as hustler. The casino is structured as a panopticon in which the full potential of technologies is used to monitor the routine performance of dealers. In this regime everything is different: the dealers are drawn from the black townships and employed as ‘previously disadvantaged individuals’; they earn hourly wages; set their own pace on the tables; have formal job security and union negotiated conditions that require managers to follow procedure regarding dismissal. Working in this regime involves neither working too hard nor taking duties too seriously but at the same time adhering to procedure as related to security.
The puzzle for Sallaz is that despite job security the dealers are disengaged from the work of dealing and, like them, he comes to experience work as iniquitous and enervating. Work comes to be a game of effacement, a shadow labor consisting of no commitment to the company coupled with recognition of the need to always follow procedure when dealing. He locates the reasons for this disengagement in the different organization of the labor process of the blackjack pit. The arrangement involves no hand dealing, five deck shufflers on tables, surveillance cameras, microphones and target reports on security aspects of dealers’ play generated from camera records of their routine work. Surveillance is carried out by camera operators who fill out reports on dealers. The pit bosses by contrast spend their time on data entry relating to clients wagering and table performance.
Sallaz’s argument is that this different organization of the labor process is a product of the establishment of a new political field in post-apartheid South Africa. Critically, the exercise of power by the new state disrupted the ability of casino operators to continue to deploy ‘juice’ to recruit white dealers from Britain. Faced with controls on hiring that favored black workers, operators resorted to centralizing management and deskilling dealers. The dealers’ response is to refuse to engage and to exit, thus producing high turnovers of dealers and management’s constant need to retrain workers.
These are compelling arguments regarding the implementation and legitimation of hegemonic and despotic casino regimes. The puzzle of the book for this reviewer, however, is that Sallaz restricts himself to representing the casino through the occupation of the blackjack dealer. He notes, for example, his surprise that the pit in Nevada remained essentially unchanged over the past 40 years but fails to record that although the blackjack dealers are an important occupational category, the occupation is a very small part of the casino industry. Profit in the new casinos is made on the gaming machines that dominate this particular post-industrial workplace and this could be said to require shifting focus and taking into account the ways in which technologies are continuously transforming the labor process of casino games. Alongside the blackjack table, other networked digital technologies have proliferated and reconfigured the casino both on the casino floor, where computerized jackpot gaming machines dominate, and in the realms of management where data handling and marketing emerge as critical.
The land-based casino in this different view is a multiplicity of things and its complexity is growing by the day with the incorporation of RFID tags into cards, chips and blackjack tables; the use of random number generators in gaming machines; and the proliferation of electronic table games in place of human dealers. It is a continuously transforming, mobile machine that has moved across boundaries and spaces to become a major presence in the cities of post-industrial societies but simultaneously it has also been reconfigured as an online presence. The disruptions associated with this latter development have been blocked in Nevada and thus the purification process has not been extended to include innovation in new modes of delivering casino games. Other states, operating in different political fields, have taken up this option and in doing so have extended the range and politics of purification and control.
These observations suggest alternative ways to open up the question of the development of global gambling. They do not detract from the fact that Sallaz has offered us an extremely useful comparative model that brings gambling out of the confines of literatures on deviance and pathology into the mainstream of sociology. It is to be hoped that his version of comparative global ethnography will provoke others to follow up on his work.