Gambling and social control. A sociological study of the emergence of a new regime of control in the field of slot machine gambling

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The project investigates the current attempts to regulate slot gaming in Germany, which explicitly aim at combating the social problem of “gambling addiction". The objective is to reconstruct the process empirically and to analyse how social control is initiated and institutionally implemented, how the affected players and companies react to the control approaches and which obstacles to implementation and evasive movements can be observed. In the analysis of current transformations in the field of commercial gambling, the project pursues the perspective of a (constructivist) sociology of social problems and bases its interpretation of the collected data partly on content-analytical, partly on hermeneutical methods as well as on discourse analysis based on sociology of knowledge. With regard to gambling, the project not only deals with an area of social reality that has so far been widely neglected by (German-speaking) sociology, but at the same time wants to make a contribution to satisfying the continuing need for an appropriate concept of social control in an increasingly digitalized world.