Diversity and Resistance to Change: Macro Conditions for Marginalization in Post-industrial Societies

We argue that two society-level properties—resistance to change and diversity within a culture—significantly affect agents' degrees of marginalization, which is here defined as access to cultural knowledge and institutional means for accomplishing cultural goals. We develop an agent-based model using findings from Norasakkunkit et al. (Norasakkunkit and Uchida, 2011, 2014; Norasakkunkit et al., 2012). We found that varying the degrees of resistance to change and diversity affected similarities between the mainstream subculture and other subcultures, changes in subcultures over time, and the relative population proportion of each subculture. In particular, we found that high diversity and low resistance to change created the greatest cultural changes within the marginalized subculture over time and allowed for maximal growth of rebellious subcultures. Also, low diversity and high resistance to change allowed for maximal growth of the marginalized subcultures and the greatest overlap between the marginalized and mainstream subcultures. These have important implications for understanding the emergence and maintenance of marginalization in post-industrial societies.