Department of Political and Economic Studies Faculty of Social Sciences University of Helsinki Finland PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION OF RECREATIONAL GAMBLING IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY FINLAND Riitta Matilainen ACADEMIC DISSERTATION To be presented, with the permission of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Helsinki, for public examination in lecture room XII, University main building, on 18 November 2017, at 12 noon. Helsinki 2017 Publications of the Faculty of Social Sciences 63 (2017) Economic and Social History © Riitta Matilainen Cover layout: Riikka Hyypiä and Hanna Sario Cover photo: Lotto girl Hilkka Kotamäki promoting Lotto at a Finnish department store in October 1971 /Courtesy of Veikkaus Archives. Lottotyttö Hilkka Kotamäki ja Nummelan SOK:n tavaratalon markkinapäivät lokakuussa 1971/Veikkauksen kuva-arkisto. Distribution and Sales: Unigrafia Bookstore http://kirjakauppa.unigrafia.fi/
[email protected] ISSN 2343-273X (pbk.) ISSN 2343-2748 (PDF) ISBN 978-951-51-3281-9 (pbk.) ISBN 978-951-51-3282-6 (PDF) Unigrafia Helsinki 2017 ABSTRACT Gambling is a ubiquitous phenomenon in Finland although only a less than a century ago lotteries in goods were the only legal form of gambling. This research explains this change. The focus of the research is on legal, commercialized gambling and on recreational gamblers instead of problem gambling or problem gamblers, because the field of gambling studies has traditionally focused on problematic aspects of gambling. The time period of the study stretches from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first one, but the focus is mostly on the twentieth century. The research question is multifaceted. The research focuses on the question of the cultural, social, and historical place of a phenomenon understood as gambling in a certain time- spatial context (in this case the Finnish society in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries).