This research report is submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in partial fulfilment of the degree of Masters of Arts in Social and Psychological Research, 2017 / South Africa has undergone a number of social and geographical changes since the end of apartheid. This has drastically changed urban spaces, where we have seen the proliferation of Gated Communities (GCs). These spaces have come to signify how inequality has evolved from being an issue exclusively bound to race to one that now occurs within races and between classes. Therefore, in order to better understand inequality the current study considered the individuals who occupy spaces of privilege, but are not necessarily part of those spaces – such as security guards. It attempts to provide descriptions of inequality, moving away from a traditional macroeconomic understanding. This is done through a thematic analysis of interviews conducted with security guards from GCs. The analysis outlines the descriptions given by the security guards on their experience of working at GCs. Four superordinate themes were derived: Professionalism; Education and Knowledge; Commodification of Life; and Violence. From these themes it is clear that we cannot only interpret inequality from an income perspective as there are a number of psychosocial factors that are integrated into the construct of inequality. / XL2018

A dissertation submitted to the Global Labour University in conformity with the requirements of a MA in Labour Policy and Globalisation School of Social Sciences Faculty of Humanities University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg March 2016 / Understanding the subjective views of low skilled marginalised workers who occupy bottom ends of labour markets and are implicated in everyday precarious living and working conditions is crucial for advancing scholarship on precarity. This qualitative study grounded in a phenomenological theoretical framework highlights the disconnects between the academic understandings of precarity and an understanding of precariousness from Zimbabwean migrant security guards’ own perspective in South Africa’s Private Security Industry (PSI), Gauteng Province. Relying on data collected through a combination of an ethnographic experience in 2014 and in-depth face to face interviews I conducted from June 2015, this study examines the perceptions that migrant security guards have on precarity, the strategies and tactics they employ to navigate everyday precarious working and living conditions and most importantly, the rationale behind these workers continued stay and work under precarious situations. As workers with precarious backgrounds, the findings of this study reveals that migrant security guards treat wage employment instrumentally, a source of their livelihood that has led to improvements in their standards of living as interpreted by them. The strategies and tactics employed by these workers either individually or collectively are therefore rationally and tactically crafted so as not directly challenge and disrupt the existing structures (state, capital and law) but instead to survive within these structures so as not to jeopardise their main source of livelihood-wage employment. For migrant security guards, wage employment remains a vital tool for meeting their varied socio-economic and political objectives. This study therefore led to the conclusion that there is generally a mismatch between academic conceptualisation of precarity and the way marginalised and low skilled labour migrants interpret and understand circumstances. / GR2017