Volume 6, Number 1, 2025

EN:

The framing of public health challenges influences how societies and governments respond to them. This paper argues that public health professionals can counter the narrative influence of harmful commodity industries by amplifying the reframing efforts of progressive social movements. We utilise Jürgen Habermas’s ideas to theorise a practical example of a network which shifted narratives to focus on the commercial determinants of gambling harms, offering an original contribution by bridging critical social theory with real-world public health advocacy. Habermasian constructs inform a systematic and theoretically grounded analysis of 33 semi-structured interviews, including people with Lived Experience (LE) of gambling harms. Habermas’s ideas, notably his diagnosis of modern social problems as antagonism between the System and the Lifeworld, provide political-economic context to the emergence of a LE social movement. We show that Habermas’s notion of communicative rationality underpins both the internal dynamics of this movement and public health professionals’ attempt to nurture a ‘counterpublic’ around it: i.e., a space for new ways of thinking and talking about social issues. Paradoxically, the findings reveal the importance and limitations of local collaborations with people affected by harmful industries in the face of those industries’ power, products and advertisements. The findings offer theoretical and practical contributions to commercial determinants research, helping to establish normative foundations and ground it in participatory public health practice.

EN:

State gambling organisations are monopolies, that increasingly proclaim a commitment to sustainability principles, however their profits come at a substantial social cost. Gambling raises an array of economic, social and ethical governance concerns. This study examines the evolution of sustainability, corporate social responsibility (CSR), environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices, and the growing trend of publishing annual sustainability reports. These aspects are considered within the literature on organisational legitimacy, and a framework of legitimacy-seeking strategies is identified. Qualitative research is utilised to analyse sustainability reports published during 2021-2022 by two state gambling monopolies: the British Columbia Lottery Corporation (BCLC) in Canada and Veikkaus in Finland. Using Leximancer software, content analysis identified key themes that can be linked to legitimacy strategies and gambling-related concerns. Findings suggest that while sustainability reports enhance organisational legitimacy, fundamental ethical and social challenges persist, requiring more deliberate managerial approaches.

EN:

Gambling harm prevention and reduction consists of a range of upstream and downstream solutions. Responsibilities for implementing and ensuring these tasks falls across a range of actors, including policymakers, regulators, health professionals and industry. Increased harms caused by online gambling necessitate new regulatory measures, and potentially new responsibilities for their implementation. The current study uses key informant interview data (N=10) conducted in four jurisdictions that have recently introduced a license-based online gambling market (Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Ontario). Our aim was to identify what kind of responsibilities for harm prevention and reduction emerge in competitive online markets, to whom responsibility for these tasks is assigned, and what kind of barriers to harm prevention exist across responsibilities. Our analysis shows that most universal responsibilities are assigned to policy makers and regulators. Selective measures aiming at those who gamble, are largely implemented in collaboration between regulators and industry. Indicated and treatment-focused measures are the shared responsibility of treatment professionals, regulators and industry. The main barriers to effective harm prevention related to conflicting interests, industry power, lacking harm prevention resources, lacking centralisation and offshore provision. We argue that improved harm prevention would require balancing existing asymmetries that relate to power, responsibilities and prioritisations.

EN:

To strengthen the right to support for people with gambling problems in Sweden, legislative changes were enacted in 2018. This study aims to critically examine how problems and solutions are represented in 69 appeals concerning gambling treatment within the general administrative court (2014–2022) and to assess how these representations have evolved following the legal amendments. The study employs Bacchi’s WPR approach to scrutinize court judgments. The results reveal that gambling problems are unequivocally recognized as severe issues requiring intervention, with both explicit and implicit notions of the problem rooted in the concept of loss of control. Prior to the legal amendments, rulings primarily focused on identifying the responsible actor for providing care, often framed within a medical discourse. Post-amendment, the focus shifted to how treatment needs should be met, emphasizing an evidence-based discourse. These varying representations produce discursive, subjectifying, and material consequences, significantly affecting access to different welfare interventions. The new legislation has solidified the responsibility of social services to provide treatment for gambling problems. However, as the study demonstrates, responsibilization of gamblers occurs not only in policy and treatment frameworks, but also within the court system.