Barbara Kinder

Dr Barbara Kinder is a Teaching Associate with the Faculty of Business, Law and Arts, based at the University’s Gold Coast Campus and currently tutors research approaches for the Industry Research Project unit. Barbara’s broader research focuses on the political economy of electronic gaming machines (EGMs) in Australia. Her thesis examined where surplus profits come from, how they arise, and how they are distributed throughout the EGM production network. The research design constituted an in-depth case study of the global value chain (GVC) for a single EGM operating at a club venue in Sydney, Australia. The study found that a distinctive political economy falls out of the value relations between the different classes in the EGM value chain. The MVT analysis reveals that powerful transnational capitalist class (TCC) gambling companies produce akratic EGM technologies for consumption in Australia’s lowest socio-economic communities for surplus profits.