The tidiest definition of failure is the opposite of success. Institutional Failure is something more: what happens when a number of critical organizations experience the opposite of success at the same time.
The purpose of this project is to add more granularity to our understanding of this phenomena, but an understanding already exists and has been vocalized. Here are some thoughtful descriptions.
The Wire Creator David Simon, Sept 05 2007:
"The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomics forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason.
In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millenium, so to speak."
Chris Dixon, January 30, 2010:
"The winners here are the people who understand the system and play it cynically. The losers are everyone else – the company’s customers, the employees who lose their jobs, and the stock market investors who don’t understand the game is rigged."
New York Times columnist David Brooks, Sept 26 2011:
"There are six or seven big institutions that are fundamentally diseased, from government to banking to housing to entitlements and the tax code.
The Simpson-Bowles report on the deficit was an opportunity to begin a wave of institutional reform. But that proposal died because our political leaders are too ideologically rigid to take on big subjects like tax reform, which involve combining Republican and Democratic ideas."
Aseem Prakash and Matthew Potoski, June 9 2016:
"in the last two decades, institutional failures seem very glaring. For one, hitherto well-functioning states seem to have become less effective in aggregating and acting upon citizens’ preferences.
Many policy initiatives of the 1990s — deregulation, privatization, new public management, private regulation, regional integration, civil society, and so on — were initially billed as major social advances but now have fallen short of expectations."
Gabriel Petek, April 5 2017
"[States] continue to benefit from certain inherent advantages that result in mostly high credit ratings. Among these are self-imposed controls against financial excess, such as balanced-budget requirements and limits on borrowing. We shouldn’t forget that states adopted these restraints in response to a series of debt crises from 1840 through the 1880s.
To this day, these fiscal institutions remain important pillars underneath states’ credit standings. The states’ co-sovereign status and fiscal integration with the federal government has also protected them in tough economic times. Now, however, demographic and macroeconomic shifts are creating stress that, for some states, render these institutions inadequate."
Umair Haque October 18, 2017
"The job of institutions, properly understood, is to safeguard something that does not exist at all: human possibility itself. It is a hard job, often a thankless job, this business of shielding the unborn from the unworthy. And yet it is in that truest way that institutions can be said to fail.
When they surrender human possibility itself to those who would destroy, ruin, or ensnare it, whether they enact that surrender by omission or commission, whether through negligence or malfeasance, then they can be judged, rightly, to have failed at their truest task, their authentic responsibility, not just to society, which is an abstraction, but to the possibility in you and I, in our children, and in the future.
These do not exist yet. But they are not abstractions. They are lived realities, love and truth and beauty and defiance and grace, waiting to be born."