ABSTRACT

Casinos have historically represented sites of vice to be suppressed because of their bad social and moral effects. Commencing in the fi nal quarter of the twentieth century, however, they are increasingly seen as ordinary businesses offering an acceptable consumer good. How was this long-stigmatized institutional form legitimized? Who were the ‘players’ in this process, and how did they conceive their own interests in gambling policy? What sorts of strategies did they deploy to ‘reframe’ casinos, and to reshape gambling policy generally?