ArticleThe International journal on drug policy2020
Online gambling venues as relational actors in addiction: Applying the actor-network approach to life stories of online gamblers.
Article in The International journal on drug policy, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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3 citing papers in PubMed.
- An investigation into internet gaming disorder and psychological correlates among medical undergraduates in vocational colleges in China: a cross-sectional appraisal.BMC psychiatry · 2026Article
- Narrative identity in addictive disorders: a conceptual review.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- Gambling Problems Are Associated with Alcohol Misuse and Insomnia: Results from a Representative National Telephone Survey.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
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Abstract
backgroundWith the emerging technologies of the Internet and smartphones during the last decades, the gambling environment has undergone a massive transformation. In Sweden, and Europe in general, online gambling has more than doubled since 2007.
methodThe paper studies online gambling venues (OGVs) as relational actors of addiction. By drawing on the actor-network theory (ANT) and assemblage thinking, we examine how OGVs, as actors in specific networks of attachment, enable the development of gambling addiction and facilitate its continuation. The data consists of life story interviews with 34 online gamblers.
resultsOnline gambling venues extend the scope of gambling opportunities through space, providing an easy portable 24-hours-a-day access to gambling online and on smartphones. This increases the spatial mobility of gambling to diverse contexts. By linking gambling to more unpredictably evolving patterns of relations, online gambling venues also increase gambling's temporal mobility to intrude in the habitual trajectories of everyday life. By enhancing the gambling mobility through space and time, OGVs simultaneously extend the scope of situations in which gambling may transform from a controlled activity into an addiction. It is then that the actor-networks of gambling infiltrate in the actor-networks of work, domestic life and leisure, and start to feed processes where they are translated to serve the interests of gambling.
conclusionBy giving us tools to challenge simplistic and taken-for-granted explanations of gambling addiction and by allowing us to grasp the flux and changing nature of addiction as a relational pattern of heterogeneous contextual attachments, the actor-network theory can help us to understand the complexity and multiplicity of gambling problems. The knowledge on what kinds of contextual attachments in diverse actor-networks enable harmful gambling and sustain unhealthy relations helps practitioners to focus treatment interventions especially on these contextual linkages and their configurations.
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