Call Centre Karma, or How Popular Culture Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Outsourcing

ABSTRACT

Since 2006, numerous movies and TV series have depicted outsourcing to India as a source of both economic and personal opportunity for American, Canadian, British and Indian characters. There has been no sustained assessment, however, of individual screen texts which address call centre work, nor any comparative work that might shed light on the significance of this transnational phenomenon. Using discourse and visual analysis, films including Outsourced, The Other End of the Line, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and TV series such as Outsourced and Mumbai Calling are shown to address popular fears over outsourcing by positing a shared neoliberal worldview, one that traverses national boundaries and histories, drawing both on enduring orientalist stereotypes and narrative tropes, as well as recent trends in Bollywood and American popular culture. These screen texts contain a limited critique of late capitalism, but nonetheless reimagine the purported risks of globalization as founts for potential benefit, both material and social, and often reconfirm the essential superiority of the West and Westerners.

KEYWORDS:

• Globalization
• India
• outsourcing
• neoliberalism
• film
• television

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.