This research will examine issue fronts concerning nepotism in the award of contracts or jobs in public administration. The research will set forth the background and context in which nepotism has emerged as an element of public administration and then discuss legal and ethical aspects informing the doling out of jobs and contracts by elected or appointed public officials to their relatives. The principal focus of research will be on small municipalities, but the connections between the vicissitudes of contract awards and other government practices and policies that entail competition for some kind of government funds can be seen in the wider area of affirmative action and minority-group grant and educational set-asides, as well as accompanying regulatory and bureaucratic apparatus.
The achievements of the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s that were embedded into law and culture fostered an ethos of both egalitarianism and competition between and among various political and social subconstituencies in the United States. According to the editors of a critical anthology of essays on the shifting cultural landscape of America in the 1990s in general, "It is one of the great paradoxes of our culture that we believe passionately in the fundamental equality of all, yet strive as hard as we can to separate ourselves from our fellow citizens."
Many of the de jure changes in minority access to opportunities in employment, education, and contracting were initiated at the federal level, where accountability of the disbursement of public funds interpenetrated issues of the constitutionality of federally mandated leveling of constituency access to employment, housing, education, and federal procurement contracts. Over the years, such changes were in various ways adopted, imposed, or affirmatively enacted at state and local levels, as well as in institutions that were subject to federal regulation or were publicly accounta...