Legitimation is a fundamental social process that describes the solidification of disparate practices, meanings, and material structures into a coherent, stable institution. In this dissertation, I study the legitimation of casino gambling as it expanded from 1976 to 2006. While scholars have tended to approach the legitimation process from one of three angles--regulatory, normative, or cultural-cognitive--I look at the ways in which these three forces combine to produce the institutional form of casino gambling that we observe today. How has casino gambling become a legitimate consumption practice? More generally, how do new industries come to be accepted in the marketplace? To answer these questions, I analyze data from cultural representations in film, public discourse in newspaper articles from three major national newspapers, and data from a cross-sectional analysis of 48 casinos in four states. First, I find that discourse about casino gambling, in both cultural and normative spheres, is governed by a semantic structure of filth/purity and poverty/wealth. These semantic categories are reconfigured over time to explain the consequences of territorial expansion, and cultural narratives like disillusionment are harnessed to understand relationships between these semantic categories. I document a historical shift from the filth/purity binary to the poverty/wealth binary over time, as gambling moves from a practice framed in moralistic terms, to one framed in techno-rational terms. I further argue that legitimation occurs not only through this discursive shift, but also through territorial instantiation and financial solvency. I introduce two new concepts--territorial and commercial legitimacy--to explain the ways in which these two important factors enter into the legitimation process. Secondly, I find that this semantic shift from moralistic to techno-rational language directly precedes the material diffusion of casino gambling in the United States. Although legitimation is a dialectical process, regulatory and normative relaxation likely touched off territorial expansion. This finding has important implications for the study of diffusion. I argue that a full theorization of the diffusion process must include not only relational mechanisms like person-to-person contact, but cultural and normative structures that can be used to explain the impact of the institutional environment on the diffusion process. Lastly, I shift from a process-oriented, historical analysis to a variation-oriented, cross-sectional analysis, where I find that different levels of normative and regulative legitimacy have differential effects on casino success. Specifically, normative legitimacy on the national level is associated with more casino success than normative legitimacy on the community or international levels. Regulative legitimacy that is instituted top-down through legislative action is associated with more success than regulatory legitimacy obtained through community or state-wide referendums. Again, I argue here that the reason for these results is primarily due to cultural variables. Specifically, legislative action allows anxieties and beliefs about gambling to remain "settled" by keeping them relatively free of public debate or scrutiny. When gambling is debated in local media prior to a referendum, cultural narratives are harnessed to dispute the normative legitimacy of gambling, thereby making it ultimately less successful and less legitimate.

Last modified

• 10/02/2018

Creator

• Ashlee Humphreys

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N20B2Q

Subject

• Marketing

Keyword

• content analysis
• institutions
• diffusion
• consumer culture
• legitimacy
• casinos

Date created

• 2008-12-05

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright