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Management Structures
The operation of casinos in both cases are
characterized by partnerships between large
gambling
firms and local ethnic groups. In South Africa,
such partnerships are defined as a way of
developing
entrepreneurial and managerial skills among
black Africans. In California, they are
stigmatized as
antithetical to the basic project of tribal
sovereignty. And in South Africa these
partnerships are subject to
little public or state scrutiny, while in the
U.S. many aspects of their structure are
delimited by state and
federal law. We thus would expect, first,
relations between firms and Africans to be
characterized by a
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higher degree of corporate control and share of
revenue than those between firms and Indians.
Second,
on the casino floor itself we would expect black
Africans to be either absent or “tokenized” as
managers—i.e., they may occupy managerial
positions but actually have little power or
autonomy—while
in California management positions should either
be filled by Native Americans or, if by outside
whites,
that the corporate affiliations of such
individuals should be concealed.
Research Agenda. (A) During an initial research
trip to South Africa I discovered that
individual provinces are granting gambling
licenses according to the same principles laid
out by
the initial NGA. I will here focus on one aspect
of the this process—the bidding process through
which gambling licenses are granted—and on one
case in particular. In 1998 the Western Cape
provincial government issued a call for bids for
what would be the sole casino in the Cape Town
metropolitan area. Eight bids were received and
the license eventually granted to Sun
International; its GrandWest casino opened in
January 2001.
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