Rules bend for the people on the inside

Pocket edition. This is a shorter version of a longer article; you can read the full edition when you have more time.

One person gets a warning and another gets told off for the same thing. The good plot next to the centre goes to someone who'd been around for two weeks. Nobody ever wrote down that staff's friends get an advantage, and everyone knows they do.

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called social capital the resources a person gets simply from belonging to a network of relationships: not what you know or what you have, but whom you know and what that connection is worth. His uncomfortable observation is that this capital works like real currency: it accumulates, it's passed down within the group and it turns into concrete advantages without anyone having to ask for anything.

That's why favouritism is almost never corruption. It's affection doing its job: you believe people you know sooner, you forgive people you like sooner.

And that's why it isn't fixed by banning it. It's only contained by making visible what until now was decided in private.