institutional

Pluralinstitutionals

1. 1
   adjective

   Relating to, typical of, or organized in the manner of an institution such as a school, hospital, or agency.

   The reform aimed to change institutional culture across the entire agency.

   Visitors often remark on the institutional atmosphere of the old asylum.

   Similarorganizational, bureaucratic, official, impersonal, clinical

   Note

   Two uses share this adjective. When it classifies, as in institutional integrity, it does not grade. When it describes a look or feel, it takes more and most freely: Brunel's Swindon lodging house gained a more 'institutional' appearance once recession forced smaller windows. That descriptive use rarely flatters. It suggests a building planned for administration rather than for comfort.

2. 2
   adjective

   Resulting from the customary practices and routines of an institution rather than from any single person.

   Institutional inertia, built up over decades of routine, blocked every attempt at reform.

   The discrimination was institutional, arising from long-standing practices rather than individual prejudice.

   Similarsystemic, structural, ingrained, organizational

   Oppositeindividual, personal

   Note

   Here the cause is the organization's habits, not any one member's intent. A classic pairing is institutional racism, as in William MacPherson's The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry (1999), which insisted the problem be accepted before it could be addressed. Keep it apart from the plain 'of an institution' sense. Institutional records belong to an institution, but institutional racism is produced by one.

3. 3
   adjective

   Established or ordained by an official authority.

   The festival is institutional, established by royal decree centuries ago.

   The observance was institutional, ordained by the church's highest authority.

   Similarestablished, official, ordained, statutory

   Oppositeunofficial, informal

4. 4
   nouncountable

   A company or other organization receiving services as a client.

   The brokerage tailored its services to institutionals managing billions in assets.

   Each institutional received a customized portfolio review.

   Oppositeindividual

   Note

   A noun of finance and corporate-governance writing that is nearly always met in the plural. Writers set institutionals against individual round-lot holders, or note foreign institutionals building stakes in Belgian companies. It works as shorthand for organizations such as funds. In general prose the singular sounds clipped and technical, so the fuller institutional investor usually reads more naturally.

5. 5
   nouncountable

   A person who has been placed in and adapted to life within an institution.

   Released after thirty years, the institutional struggled to cope with everyday choices.

   Many institutionals find freedom frightening after a lifetime of fixed schedules.

   Note

   A label from the language of care, rights and social policy, used mostly in the plural as a group name: the so-called institutionals. It takes the prefix ex- readily, so ex-institutionals are people who have left that life behind. Judith Walzer Leavitt's Brought to Bed (2016) applies it historically to the poorest and most desperate women of the cities, often unmarried and without family support.

6. 6
   nouncountable

   A community where most inhabitants work at an institution rather than in industry or trade, or a resident of such a place.

   The settlement grew into an institutional, every household tied to the hospital's payroll.

   Generations of institutionals had served the great asylum on the hill.

   Note

   A planner's category rather than an everyday word. Mid-century studies sorted towns into marketing centers and industrial, balanced and institutional types. Examples run from the Civil Aeronautics Administration's Airport Planning (1948) to Robert Horonjeff's The Planning and Design of Airports (1962). Institutionals were low in both trade and industrial employment, yet they generated more airline passengers per head than industrial towns did.

7. 7
   nouncountable

   A person whose sense of self rests on institutionalized values and standards rather than on personal tastes and impulses.

   The classic institutional measures personal worth by the organization's standards alone.

   Among institutionals, the line between self and role gradually disappears.

   Similarconformist

   Oppositeindividualist, nonconformist

   Note

   Sociology sets this figure against the impulse conception of the self. For institutionals, as Wood and Zurcher put it in 1988, the self is revealed by holding to a high standard despite adverse conditions. For Roy F. Baumeister, their hypocrisy is failing to live up to one's standards. Nothing here involves confinement, which separates it from the institutionalized person.

8. 8
   adjective

   Elementary or rudimentary; concerned only with first principles.

   The treatise offered an institutional introduction, covering only the rudiments of law.

   Her institutional knowledge of the subject reached no further than first principles.

   Similarelementary, rudimentary, basic, introductory, fundamental

   Oppositeadvanced, sophisticated, specialized

9. 9
   nouncountable

   In Chile, a senator appointed rather than elected to an eight-year term, whether by the president or by another state body, in a post since abolished.

   The reform finally abolished the institutional, an unelected fixture of the old constitution.

   Critics argued that institutionals weakened the power of elected senators.

   Note

   Writing on Chilean politics treats the word as a collective label, almost always plural: the institutionals. The seats went to former office-holders, including commanders from each branch of the armed forces chosen by the National Security Council, former Supreme Court judges and a former comptroller-general. Analysts tracked them as a voting group, one that Peter M. Siavelis describes as a generally reliable ally of the Right.

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