Institutions resist change and maintain established practices.
Unattributed. Hannan and Freeman's organisational ecology is the researched version, and its explanation is that the reliability which lets an organisation survive is what makes it inert.
In practice
- A bank's Saturday hours were set for a workforce paid weekly in cash, and outlast the last cash payroll by four decades.
- Their explanation is worth keeping: the reliability that let an organisation survive is exactly what makes it inert, so inertia is a byproduct of fitness rather than a defect.