zombie institution

English

Noun

zombie institution (plural zombie institutions)

1. Synonym of zombie business
   • 1993, Kevin Dowd, Laissez Faire Banking, page 301:

     The problem is aggravated even further by the absence of any reliable mechanism to close down zombie institutions before they can inflict too much damage on other parties.

   • 2010, United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Budget, Economic and Budget Challenges for the Short and Long Term, page 27:

     I do not think that any major U.S. bank is currently a zombie institution. They are all lending, they are all active, and they are all viable.

   • 2014, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Financial Services. Subcommittee on Monetary Policy and Trade, The Fed Turns 100:

     The first thing it says is: Do not practice discretionary forbearance, turning a blind eye in the vain hope that a failing firm's red ink will happily turn to black, that a zombie institution will come back to life, that toxic assets will detoxify themselves.

   • 2015, Allen N. Berger, Philip Molyneux, John O. S. Wilson, The Oxford Handbook of Banking, page 510:

     If a bank's NW_E declines through zero, it becomes a "zombie” institution.

2. Synonym of zombie organization
   • 2013, Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power, page 199:

     In my youth, sad to say, my closest encounter with a zombie institution seemed to be the Department of Motor Vehicles, where employees dulled by low expectations slowly and sullenly served frustrated citizens under pallid fluorescent lights.

   • 2017, Sinead Murphy, Zombie University: Thinking Under Control:

     That is what it is like to learn in a zombie institution: thinking long-gone, and only the admin jobs remaining.

   • 2023, Petra Mikulan, Michalinos Zembylas, Working with Theories of Refusal and Decolonization in Higher Education, page 2016:

     The rewards for going along to get along serve the zombie institution.

   • 2023, Sebastian Mayer, Research Handbook on NATO, page 358:

     Leading realists thus predicted that after 1990 the Alliance would collapse or become a zombie institution, that is, surviving in name only, given that the existential military threat melted away after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact (Waltz 1993, p. 76).

   • 2024, Andrew F. Cooper, The Concertation Impulse in World Politics, page 317:

     Commonly, the image of death has taken hold operationally, with the existence of the G20 at most being equated as a 'zombie' institution continuing to operate, but without signs of influential life.

3. An institution (custom or practice) that has lost its relevance or meaning.
   • 2007, Heinz Streib, Religion Inside and Outside Traditional Institutions, page 183:

     In the words of Ulrich Beck, the church may be considered another example of a 'zombie institution', like family, class and neighborhood.

   • 2009, Jodi O'Brien, Encyclopedia of Gender and Society, page 2:

     These statistics are, for some, indicative of how processes of detraditionalization and individualization have made marriage a "zombie” institution.

   • 2017, Nicholas White, French Divorce Fiction from the Revolution to the First World War:

     It is in this context that Ulrich Beck can ask whether the contemporary family is a 'zombie institution', which is 'dead and still alive': Ask yourself what actually is a family nowadays? What does it mean?

4. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see zombie,‎ institution.
   • 2020, Albert Aykler, Just Say Zombie: A Pre-Apocalypse Madhouse Zombie Novel:

     Trying to orient the self that my ass was busy trying to save as it hauled me through the corridors of this bloody zombie institution .