Any spares? I’ll buy or sell: an ethnographic study of black market ticket sales

This thesis contributes to the limited knowledge on ticket touting and ticket touts. Building on the previous research, mainly produced before online touting, this work offers new insight into the backgrounds, motivations, experiences and justifications of individuals belonging to the “deviant” world of black market ticket sales. An ethnographic approach was adopted, consisting of participant observation, interviews, and observations in the field. Through the specific method of verstehen (Weber, 1949) the researcher experienced the “pleasure, excitement and fear” of criminality (Ferrell, 1998) to glean and present a more reliable understanding and appreciation of touting than that currently available. This research bridges a key gap in the literature on entrepreneurial deviance, of “crime as work” (Ruggiero, 2000), locating professional ticket touting within the context of both legitimate and illegitimate opportunities that are exploited by entrepreneurs in the “zones of ambiguity” (Hornsby and Hobbs, 1997). The results of the research offer a detailed understanding of the real methods employed by touts to acquire and resell tickets, and identify the methods commonly debated in the media and in parliamentary discourse, such as bots, as distractions, or as “engineered moral panics” (Atkinson, 1997).

Name dc:type.qualificationname

phd

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Greenwich

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Moretti, Alessandro

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Jolliffe, Darrick

• HB Economic Theory
• KD England and Wales

Language dc:language

en