Spatial Precarities: Work, Space, and Insecurity in Istanbul’s Private Security Industry

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 27: Frontline Service Work

Abstract

How can workers with formally identical employment conditions experience radically different forms of insecurity? This paper examines this puzzle in Istanbul’s private security industry, where guards share the same licenses, training, and subcontracted employment arrangements, yet describe their work as ranging from stable and insulated to disposable and degrading. Dominant precarity frameworks typically reduce precarious work to insecure employment conditions, treating work as a property of the labor contract. I argue instead that work precarity must be grounded in the concept of work as a practical, embodied activity embedded in concrete social and material environments. Drawing on two years of qualitative fieldwork (2018–2020), including participant observation and 77 in-depth interviews across three sites (an international airport, a public hospital, and a gated residential community) I develop a multidimensional framework of work precarity encompassing employment, legal, organizational, and relational dimensions. I show that these dimensions do not cluster uniformly. Rather, space actively reorganizes them into distinct regimes of precarity. At the airport, dense regulation, technological mediation, and proximity to state authority produce a regime of buffered precarity. At the hospital, institutional volatility and task ambiguity generate exposed precarity. In gated residential communities, weak oversight, triangulated authority relations, and sustained status asymmetries condense all four dimensions into an intensified regime of disposability. By theorizing space as an active mediator of precarity rather than a passive backdrop, this paper bridges labor sociology and urban sociology. It demonstrates that precarious labor cannot be understood solely through employment relations but must be analyzed through the spatial infrastructures, regulatory architectures, and interactional ecologies in which work unfolds.

Author

• Gokhan Mulayim, Montana State University