Социални задължения срещу икономически интереси. Непотизмът при наемането на работа в дребните фирми
Social debats against economic interests. Nepotism at hiring in small firms

Summary/Abstract: The author analyzes the experience of small entrepreneurs with regards to practices of nepotism at hiring workers and employees on the basis of two sociological surveys from 2002-2003. Nepotism is considered as a practice managed by the informal institution of “ties“ in Bulgaria. It is interpreted as a collision between the informal market mechanisms dictating the economic behaviour of maximization, moral debts, and the social pressure of maintaining reciprocal relationships. The author compares the experience of hiring family members with hiring relatives and close friends. The analysis confirms that the balance between the family and business roles is good when the business hierarchy coincides with the family hierarchy. In contrast to hiring family members, hiring relatives and friends is explicitly evaluated as negative. The main reason is the culturally determined impossibility to keep “separate“ the entitlements arising from kinship/friendship from the entitlements on the economic activity. Therefore nepotism is de-legitimized as a way of thinking. Nevertheless, the small owner continues with this practice due to the social pressure from the institution of “ties“, due to the moral pressure connected to unemployment and poverty, as well as because of the need to decrease insecurity by the means of personal trust. In the last section of the paper, there is a discussion on the new types of culture in the relationships employer-employee: the formalization in synchronization with the legal regulation and informality practiced twofold: as full or partial legal deregulation of the labour relations and as an adaptation of the principle of familism to the market conditions.

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