The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (130 page)

BOOK: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics
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industrial society
A society which exhibits an extended division of labour and a reliance on large-scale production using power-driven machinery. This characterization does not include any specification about markets, and thus industrial society has been seen as a common designation for recent capitalist and socialist formations.
Saint-Simon
, who used the category of industrial society in historical contrast with military society, envisaged a technocratic future. Other writers who were conscious of the emergence of a new form of market society emphasized a further characteristic: widespread participation in the labour market, coupled with very limited participation of the direct producers in the product market.
Marx
, for example, saw this as one characteristic of the capitalist form of industrial society. It has been suggested that postindustrial society has now emerged. In postindustrial society, division of labour may be looser than in industrial society because people have transferable skills; accordingly, the industrial discipline of fordism is looser as well. Hence some Marxist scholars call modern postindustrial societies ‘postfordist’.
AR 
inflation
A general and persistent increase in the price level. Inflation has been seen to lead to uncertainty, discouraging saving and investment, as well as affecting a country's international trade, via the exchange rate and balance of payments, and redistributing income, from those with savings to borrowers. With the increasing influence of monetarist thinking during the 1970s, which itself was partly due to the jump in international inflation after the
OPEC
crisis of 1973, the reduction of inflation became a key target of economic policy. Methods of controlling the price level centred on incomes policies, and when these were seen to be generally unsuccessful, on
monetary policy
.
initiative
A particular form of the
referendum
used especially in Switzerland and California. In the latter, to be placed on the ballot, an initiative needs signatures which equal 5 per cent of the vote for governor in the last election, or 8 per cent in the case of a proposal for a constitutional amendment. The initiative was used increasingly frequently in the 1970s and 1980s. Proposition 13 in 1978 severely restricted property taxes and was seen as the forerunner of taxpayers' revolts throughout the world. Proposition 187 in 1994 declared that illegal immigrants to California were to be ineligible for public services.
WG 
Inkatha
The Inkatha Freedom Party was formed in 1975 in South Africa by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi , Chief Minister of the Kwa-Zulu ‘homeland’, as a political party based mainly on Zulu aspirations. Buthelezi sought to attract a mass audience nationally by opposing apartheid and presenting the IFP as successor to the African National Congress, then a banned organization. With restrictions on the
ANC
lifted in 1990, Inkatha is increasingly concerned to protect its regional base, demanding a loose federal system with extensive local autonomy in any new, democratic political order. It entered the 1994 elections at the last minute; coming third in terms of votes after the ANC and the National Party.
IC 
intelligence services
All states gather intelligence about the ‘enemies of the state’ at home and abroad. The police and armed forces collect and act on intelligence, but the term intelligence services refers to services organized expressly for the collection of secret information. Such services also take covert (disavowable) activity on behalf of the state.
In Britain there are two such organizations, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), which is supposed only to operate abroad and is controlled through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Intelligence Service (MI5) which operates at home and is controlled through the Home Office. Both services engage both in the collection of intelligence and in counter-intelligence—that is, in combating the activities of others, especially other intelligence services, working against British interests. The evidence, much of it necessarily nonverifiable, is that the organizations devoted much energy into watching each other and that both were heavily penetrated by the very organization—namely, the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB—that they were supposed to be fighting. The existence and operations of both services raise problems of ministerial control and accountability to democratic or parliamentary procedures. Another general area of concern has been the extent of collaboration between intelligence services behind the backs of governments.
In the United States the Federal Bureau of Investigation (domestic) and the Central Intelligence Agency (overseas) play roles similar to the two British services, though they have always been much more open and, at least in theory, subject to democratic accountability. In the Soviet Union the KGB, the descendant of a series of intelligence organizations dating back to Tsarist times, was responsible for both domestic and external intelligence, and for a system of labour camps and prisons (the ‘
Gulag
’), and also commanded troops for frontier defence. Other intelligence services which have attracted widespread interest include the French DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure) and the Israeli Mossad (external) and Shin Bet (internal).
PBy 

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