Practice rooted in survival coping resists change more than top-down policy does

Evidence

A second difficulty is that the patterns of practice that develop in this work are rooted in the fundamental coping requirements of the job. These are not easily abandoned or changed because they are experienced by workers and outside observers as virtual job requirements. People do not readily give up survival mechanisms. This is one of the reasons it is easier to change articulated policy from the top than to change practice from below. Policy articulated from the top is not rooted in defense mechanisms developed to cope with the job, while the policy that emerges from practice is rooted in survival. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1354

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Names the precise speed differential the reader wants to test: articulated policy is frictionless while practice is welded to survival, so practice lags and outlasts the cultural narrative.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s hypothesis about discretion routinizing stereotypes faster than culture shifts — here the mechanism is inverted, practice is the slow variable and policy the fast one.