Securing the neo-liberal city : risk markets, gentrification and low-wage work in Vancouver
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Private security guards have become an increasingly visible presence in urban centres across North America -- Vancouver is no exception. This research explores the growth of the private security industry and the working lives of frontline guards within the context of neo-liberal economic and governance policies at the national, provincial and municipal levels, inner-city revitalization projects, and the emergence of a two-tiered post-industrial labour market. Private security firms are conceptualized first and foremost as selling security as a commodity. The demand for security services, or ‘risk markets’, have developed in Vancouver due in large part to the contracting out of formerly public services, dissatisfaction with public policing services among groups and individuals with resources to purchase alternatives and mounting social tensions resulting from inner-city gentrification and growing poverty and homelessness. Low wages, lax labour standards and limited regulation make private security services both affordable for clients and profitable for security entrepreneurs. Based on interviews with frontline security guards and representatives from management at private security firms, this research finds that guards occupy a contradictory social location as both low-wage workers and as agents of social control contracted to police some of the poorest and most marginalized members of society. This study asserts that while the presence of private guards can address some of the real and perceived security concerns in Vancouver’s increasingly economically and socially polarized inner-city, there are contradictions inherent in the city’s current approach to both urban development and policing. These contradictions include the reality that urban gentrification and government policies aimed at attracting investors, tourists and upper-income consumers to Vancouver inevitably contribute to the social problems that make the inner-city undesirable, that the security industry has a vested interest in generating demand for their product, and that low-wage guards have little stake in the order they have been contracted to uphold.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".