Resistance to Change

Abstract

An important perspective on institutions and technology is how they resist change, isolated or in tandem. Categories of institutional change are reviewed together with concepts such as path dependency, technological momentum and increasingly costly reversibility, all capture processes in which material and institutional practices and norms are stable. Resistance to change seems to rely on two fundamental characteristics. In some cases, it can be derived from the costs involved when changing practices or concretely substituting old technologies for new. In others, individual behavior may conserve existing practices, for instance, through conscious reluctance to change or through the force of routine. Most often, however, a combination of the two is the most important prerequisite for resistance to change.