Comment by TeMPOraL
That's why "nepotism" still thrives, in spite of (at least here in the West) several generations being taught that it's bad, evil and unfair.
That's why "nepotism" still thrives, in spite of (at least here in the West) several generations being taught that it's bad, evil and unfair.
It's part of it.
Nepotism entangles organizational interests with personal interests, in both good and bad ways. It means that someone may hire a friend or family member because they know they're a) competent enough for the job, and b) they actually, personally know them, which significantly reduces a risk of the hire turning out bad, relative to a stranger with equal or better credentials. But it also means that someone may hire a friend or family member because they're trading favors, which is bad for the organization[0].
I suppose in practice the latter might be more common - I'd guess it could be the whole idea has structural dynamics similar to "the market for lemons". I haven't spent much time thinking about it and researching the problem in depth, so I can't say.
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[0] - And may or may not be bad for the local community. I suppose the larger problem for organizations is simply that they're designed to be focused, and need to maintain alignment of incentives across the org chart. Nepotism is a threat because it attaches new edges to the org chart - edges that lead to much more complex and fuzzy graphs of family and community relationships, breaking the narrow focus that makes organizations work.
That isn’t why nepotism exists.
Nepotism is because ‘what is the point of doing all this’ - aka passing things on to family.
It also enables a degree of aligned interests between what could otherwise be hard to align parties (trust, like you mention), but that not why someone gets a big name acting slot, or gets put on the board of a friends company.