Castro and Batel's (2008) study points to some important strategies of resistance to social change in the transformation of transcendent to immanent representations. We contextualize this study within a broader cyclical model of social change, in which their focus is one of the four phases in the cycle. The expanded model is exemplified in the shifting representations of science communication in the UK from the `deficit model' of public understanding of science to the dialogic representation of `public engagement'. Within each of the four proposed phases, the dialectic of adoption/rejection is central, although it is modulated by strategies of resistance and the selective distribution of resources.