| Summary: | The social compromise around capitalism, which was traditionally focused on the conflict between capital and labor, has now moved towards a broader conflict opposing capital accumulation on the one hand, protection of the environment and social justice on the other. Through a strategic-relational analysis of the Indian case, which articulates a country-based with a company-based case study, this article explores the crisis of the social compromise around the “new” Indian corporate capitalism, and the conditions of emergence of a renewed social compromise. We first show how the economic reforms initiated during the 1980s and pursued during the 1990s have resulted into firms focusing more on their economic and financial performance. As the new strategies are hard to combine with the social compromises preexisting at the company-level, India has witnessed an increasing number of social conflicts within and around its industry. Reacting to this phenomenon, civil society organizations have mobilized on a large scale. “Translating” the local conflicts into social issues, they exert significant pressure on policy-makers for tightening the political and institutional framework regulating corporate capitalism. Though the impacts of those social mobilizations are recent, they point towards the elaboration of a new social compromise between capital accumulation, protection of the environment and social justice.
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