Institutional Inertia and Transformation

‘Alongside the modern evils, we are oppressed by a whole series of inherited evils, arising from the passive survival of… anachronistic social and political relations. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead.’ (Marx)

We can criticize institutions, ideas and practices because they are exploitative, violent, oppressive, racist or unjust. But the problem can also be that they just don’t work anymore. Fossil-fuel based economies, centuries-old political institutions and constitutions, or the patriarchal nuclear family might have made sense in the context in which they emerged, but today, they have become outdated, either because they no longer correspond to changed social norms, or because they no longer successfully exercise the function for which they were once instituted, or both. As Adorno wrote, ‘modes of conduct which were once rational, but have now become obsolete, are evoked unchanged by the logic of history.’

There seems to be a kind of inertia inherent in institutions: once they are established, institutions start to live a life of their own; they are reproduced without conscious reflection or design and they resist attempts to change them, even when change is sorely needed. But this inertia is inherent to the way institutions function: institutions provide stability by fixing rules, laws, social roles and hierarchies, protocols, definitions and patterns of behaviour, and this is what makes them function effectively. Institutional inertia, as Sartre suggests, can also be ‘enriching’: it opens up new possible courses of action and provides the background stability without which a meaningful understanding of the world would not be possible at all.

This conference brings together scholars working on questions relating to institutions, institutional persistence and institutional change from a variety of perspectives and disciplines, in order to address the following questions: how do we distinguish between normal or legitimate institutional reproduction and ‘irrational’ institutional inertia? How can we judge institutions to be obsolete? How do institutions resist change or perpetuate themselves even though they no longer correspond to changing social norms, or are no longer effective, or have even become destructive? How can we resist, escape, or make use of institutional inertia, and what are the preconditions for institutional transformation?