Peculiar and Precarious: The Economization of Private Security in Istanbul

Abstract

This dissertation explores the intersections of peculiarity, precarity, and spatiality in private security work in Istanbul. Emerging relatively recently in 2004, Turkey's contractual private security industry has grown exponentially, becoming one of the largest in Europe and a "safe haven" for job seekers attempting to escape the rising employment precarity in the broader labor market. Focusing on the service, servers, and spaces of security, this research offers a multi-sited ethnographic analysis of security's economization within Turkey's private security industry, looking into three key sites: an airport, a hospital, and a gated residential community. Initially, the study investigates how space shapes the economization of security as a peculiar good. Drawing on economic sociology literature, it expands the current understanding of peculiar goods by focusing on micro-level processes of translation of these peculiar goods into market objects. In doing so, it argues for the formative role of space in framing, providing, and delivering security within the private security industry. The study then shifts its focus from the service to the servers, analyzing the precarious nature of work within this industry. It identifies four forms of precarity - employment, legal, organizational, and relational - that shape the uncertainties, instabilities, and insecurities experienced by private security industry workers. This dissertation challenges the precarity literature's tendency to reduce work to employment and advocates for a practical and pragmatic analysis of work. Lastly, the study builds upon the multidimensional approach to work precarity proposed earlier and investigates the variation of work precarity experiences within the industry. It provides a comparative ethnographic exploration of how space shapes work precarity experiences across three distinct sites. By doing so, it underscores the spatial embeddedness of work precarity experiences of private security guards. Consequently, this research contributes to the precarity literature by considering work's practical and spatial nature.