Thursday, November 7, 2024, 7pm, VH 1010
Zoom recording
Gokhan Mulayim
Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fire: Work Precarity in Turkey’s Private Security Industry
Over the past two decades, Turkey’s private security industry has grown into one of the largest in Europe. The emergence of the contractual security market in 2004 coincided with neoliberal reforms that deregulated labor markets, resulting in an increasingly precarious workforce. Many workers facing precarity turned to the private security sector as a refuge from unstable employment. However, those who entered the sector encountered even deeper forms of precarity.
This talk presents an ethnographic analysis of the lived experiences of frontline private security guards in Istanbul, focusing on how insecurity arises not only from employment conditions but also from the activities performed on the job. Drawing on two years of fieldwork, I identify four interlocking forms of precarity—employment, legal, organizational, and relational—that generate uncertainties and vulnerabilities for guards. By shifting the focus from work as a static employment relationship to work as a fluid and dynamic activity, this talk offers a new analytical framework for understanding the complexities of precarious labor processes. Attendees will gain insight into how Turkey’s private security sector reflects broader trends of informalization, subcontracting, and regulatory gaps that are reshaping labor markets under neoliberalism.
Gökhan Mülayim holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Boston University, with research interests in economic and cultural sociology, the sociology of work and organizations, and urban studies. His research explores how extra-economic goods and services are transformed into marketable objects and how such markets operate. His doctoral work, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul, examines the economization of private security as a political, social, and affective service. Dr. Mülayim has taught at Boston University, Boston College, and Boğaziçi University and served as chief editor of the Accounts newsletter for the American Sociological Association’s Economic Sociology Section for four years. Beyond academia, he has contributed to large-scale research projects with private research firms and NGOs, focusing on political polarization, migration, gender data gaps, and women’s poverty in Turkey.
