SUMMARY
The focus of this exploratory analysis was the idea and locus of agency in conceptualisations of gambling and problem/pathological gambling within corporate and academic domains as presented in public discourses. In order to unpick and analyse how such agency is being conceptualised and presented, the author carried out a preliminary thematic analysis of selected public documents. While annual financial reports, academic articles, and public testimony constituted the sample for analysis, the intention was to propose a methodology and framework of analysis that might be applied by future researchers to an expanded selection of documents deemed to be of interest. A notable overlap of themes was found wherein agency for (problematic) gambling was placed with individual gamblers against an assumed neutral backdrop of free-market forces, with industries only agentic in responding to the consumption demands of freely choosing (and implicitly self-actualising) individuals (except where credit is taken for the generation of increased consumption as translated into profits). In conclusion, it is suggested that the legitimacy and practice of political-economic and institutional analyses be reclaimed, providing complementarity to current reflections on the nature of agency and assisting us to better understand the notion of (gambling-related) harm production.