Abstract
Manno examines the pressures on blue-collar and white-collar neoliberal workers as they are required to take on more risk in the face of an increasingly contingent and temporary employment landscape. Focusing on the pressure employees face to become self-sufficient career managers who create personal brands, Manno explores how such workers struggle to be “dealt in” to the workforce in meaningful ways. The chapter uses examples of the problems that truckers and white-collar Amazon employees face and the unequal way that issues of social class impact how employees have access to resources in order to manage work instability. The chapter concludes with twenty-first-century examples of the Poker Mindset as seen in the careers of Daily Fantasy sports gamblers, e-sports participants, and online gaming streamers.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Anders, George. 2019. “Inside Amazon’s Idea Machine: How Bezos Decodes Customers.” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2012/04/04/inside-amazon/. Accessed June 2, 2019.
Berlant, Laura. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bezos, Jeff. 2010. “2010 Baccalaureate Remarks.” Princeton University. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2010/05/30/2010-baccalaureate-remarks. Accessed June 2, 2019.
Cheiffetz, Julia. 2015. “I Had a Baby and Cancer When I Worked at Amazon. This Is My Story.” Medium, August 26. https://medium.com/@jcheiffetz/i-had-a-baby-and-cancer-when-i-worked-at-amazon-this-is-my-story-9eba5eef2976. Accessed June 2, 2019.
Collins, Paul. 2009. “If Amazon.Com Gives Almost Nothing to Charity, Should We Care?” Slate Magazine, March 6. https://slate.com/culture/2009/03/if-amazon-com-gives-almost-nothing-to-charity-should-we-care.html. Accessed June 2, 2019.
“Daily Fantasy Sports.” 2019. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Daily_fantasy_sports&oldid=899205867. Accessed June 2, 2019.
Draut, Tamara. 2016. Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday.
Duggan, Lisa. 2019. Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed. American Studies Now: Critical Histories of the Present, 8. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Duncan, Aaron. 2014. “Reimagining the Self-Made Man: Myth, Risk, and the Pokerization of America.” Western Journal of Communication 78 (1): 39–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2013.807435.
Fagan, Kevin, and Kaylee Webb. 2019. “This 27-Year-Old Makes $500,000 Every Month Playing ‘Fortnite’ in His Bedroom—Here’s How He Does It.” Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/ninja-tyler-blevins-twitch-subscribers-fortnite-drake-youtube-2018-3. Accessed June 8, 2019.
Gershon, Ilana. 2017. Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hilvert-Bruce, Zorah, James T. Neill, Max Sjöblom, and Juho Hamari. 2018. “Social Motivations of Live-Streaming Viewer Engagement on Twitch.” Computers in Human Behavior 84 (July): 58–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.02.013.
Kang, Jay Caspian. 2018. “How the Daily Fantasy Sports Industry Turns Fans into Suckers.” The New York Times, January 19, sec. Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/06/magazine/how-the-daily-fantasy-sports-industry-turns-fans-into-suckers.html. Accessed June 2, 2019.
Kantor, Jodi, and David Streitfeld. 2018. “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace.” The New York Times, January 19, sec. Business. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html. Accessed June 2, 2019.
Kvidera, Max. 2019. “Custom Pay.” Overdrive. https://www.overdriveonline.com/custom-pay/. Accessed June 11, 2019.
La Monica, Paul R. 2019. “Amazon Is the World’s Most Valuable Company.” CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/08/investing/amazon-most-valuable-company-microsoft-google-apple/index.html. Accessed June 3, 2019.
Lane, Carrie M. 2011. A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
“Leadership Principles.” 2019. Amazon Jobs. https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles. Accessed June 2, 2019.
Lowrey, Annie. 2015. “Amazon’s White-Collar Salary Slaves.” New York, August 7. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/08/amazons-white-collar-salary-slaves.html. Accessed July 22, 2019.
Mantel, Barbara. 2016. “Betting on Sports.” CQ Researcher 26, no. 38 (October 28): 889–912. http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/cqresrre2016102800.
Marshall, Patrick. 2019. “Esports Boom.” CQ Researcher 29, no. 1 (January 4): 1–50. http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/cqresrre2019010400.
Martinez, Amy, and Kristi Heim. 2012. “Amazon a Virtual No-Show in Hometown Philanthropy.” The Seattle Times, March 31. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon-a-virtual-no-show-in-hometown-philanthropy/. Accessed June 2, 2019.
“Ninja—YouTube.” 2019. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/user/NinjasHyper/about. Accessed June 8, 2019.
“Overdrive.” 2019. “Overdrive Magazine.” Overdrive. https://www.overdriveonline.com. Accessed June 11, 2019.
Partin, William Clyde. 2019. “Watch Me Pay: Twitch and the Cultural Economy of Surveillance.” Surveillance & Society 17 (1/2): 153–60. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i1/2.13021.
Pugh, Allison J. 2015. The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Putney, Clifford. 2001. Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rotundo, E. Anthony. 1993. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York: Basic Books.
Scholz, Trebor. 2017. Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. http://swbplus.bsz-bw.de/bsz46803675xcov.htm.
Scott, Ryan. 2019. “What Amazon’s Work Culture Tells Us About Employee Disengagement.” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/causeintegration/2015/08/21/what-amazons-work-culture-tells-us-about-employee-disengagement/. Accessed June 2, 2019.
Silva, Jennifer M. 2015. Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sjöblom, Max, and Juho Hamari. 2017. “Why Do People Watch Others Play Video Games? An Empirical Study on the Motivations of Twitch Users.” Computers in Human Behavior 75 (October): 985–96. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.10.019.
Snyder, Benjamin H. 2016. The Disrupted Workplace: Time and the Moral Order of Flexible Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Standing, Guy. 2016. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing.
Tavernise, Sabrina. 2019. “With His Job Gone, an Autoworker Wonders, ‘What Am I as a Man?’” The New York Times, May 27, sec. U.S. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/us/auto-worker-jobs-lost.html. Accessed June 2, 2019.
Taylor, T. L. 2018. “Twitch and the Work of Play.” American Journal of Play 11 (1): 65–84.
Viscelli, Steve. 2016. The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Wakabayashi, Daisuke. 2019. “Google’s Shadow Work Force: Temps Who Outnumber Full-Time Employees.” The New York Times, May 28, sec. Technology. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/technology/google-temp-workers.html. Accessed June 2, 2019.
Weil, David. 2014. The Fissured Workplace Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press.
Wikipedia contributors. “Fantasy Sport.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fantasy_sport&oldid=903426709. Accessed July 16, 2019.
Young, Martin. 2010. “Gambling, Capitalism and the State: Towards a New Dialectic of the Risk Society?” Journal of Consumer Culture 10 (2): 254–73. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540510364593.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Manno, A. (2020). “Deal Me In”: Neoliberal Workers and the Poker Mindset. In: Toxic Masculinity, Casino Capitalism, and America's Favorite Card Game. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40260-0_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40260-0_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-40259-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-40260-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)