Abstract
India’s current ‘pro-business’ development regime has been both challenged by depictions of malevolent corporations oppressing helpless village communities and legitimised by depictions of socially responsible corporations ‘developing’ grateful backward communities. To overcome these contradictory narratives, which fail to account for the intricate relationships between villagers and corporate actors, the article analyses how these narratives are constructed in interaction with local conflicts surrounding industrial activity. Guided by a framework based on social systems theory, a detailed study of two cement plants located in Chhattisgarh shows how this interaction operates through multiple discursive layers, which vary in terms of their degree of specification/generalisation and concreteness/abstraction.
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