business as usual

alternative business-as-usual

1. idiomaticThe normal course of an activity, particularly in circumstances that are out of the ordinary.

   In other words, it is business as usual on the Korean Peninsula. Perhaps, when the atmosphere cools down, an argument can be made for giving North Korea’s leaders some of the assistance they want, if they are willing to make concessions of their own.

   2013 April 9, Andrei Lankov, “Stay Cool. Call North Korea’s Bluff.”, in New York Times

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   The phase^([sic]) “Business as Usual” ran about the world, and the papers abounded in articles in which going on as though there was no war at all was demonstrated to be the truest form of patriotism. […] “Business as usual during Alterations to the Map of Europe” was the advertisement of one cheerful barber, widely quoted. . . .

   1916, H. G. Wells, “Onlookers”, in Mr. Britling Sees It Through, New York: Macmillan, Book II, page 214

   This was very well illustrated when Extinction Rebellion protests disrupted traffic in London in April 2019, and Mayor Sadiq Khan insisted that while he shared “the passion about tackling climate change of those protesting”[…] Londoners needed to be able to return to “business as usual”.

   2020, Marcus Gilroy-Ware, quoting Sadiq Khan, After the Fact?, Repeater, →ISBN

2. idiomaticThe normal execution of standard functional operations within an organisation, particularly in contrast to a project or program which would introduce change (although that change may itself become business as usual).

alternative business-as-usual

1. idiomaticnot comparableThat is usual, expected, not extraordinary.

   This vehicle would be likely to cost about $1,500 more at retail than the business as usual vehicle, which achieves 33 mpg.

   1995, Advanced automotive technology : visions of a super-efficient family car.

   1 more example

   According to the ‘business as usual’ school of modern historians, the millennial preoccupations of Glaber and Wulfstan hold no more significance than the jeremiads of the gullible and doom-laden who agonise in every society - the medieval equivalents of believers in UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, and the X files.

   1999, Robert Lacey, Danny Danziger, The Year 1000: What life was like at the turn of The First Millennium, London: Abacus, published 2000, page 187