It would be much too facile and partly erroneous to attribute such resistance by bureaucrats simply to vested interests. Vested interests oppose any new order which either eliminates or at least makes uncertain their differential advantage deriving from the current arrangements. This is undoubtedly involved in part in bureaucratic resistance to change but another process is perhaps more significant. As we have seen, bureaucratic officials affectively identify themselves with their way of life. They have a pride of craft which leads them to resist change in established routines, at least, those changes which are felt to be imposed by others. This non logical pride of craft is a familiar pattern found even, to judge from Sutherland's Professional Thief, among pickpockets who, despite the risk, delight in mastering the prestige-bearing feat of “beating a left breech’ (picking the left front trousers pocket).
In a stimulating paper, Hughes has applied the concepts of “secular” and “sacred” to various types of division of labor; “the sacredness” of caste and Stande prerogatives contrasts sharply with the increasing secularism of occupational differentiation in our society.