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This chapter presents a comparison of two ethnographic case studies in two different national contexts, with the purpose of separating the rhetorics from the realities in the field of diversity management. It counterweighs mainstream diversity management literature by discussing (1) the disadvantages of certain offshoots of diversity management discourses for ethnic minority police officers in the Netherlands and (2) the benefits of the absence of diversity management for software engineers working in a highly internationalized high-tech company in Finland, a company characterized by a strong tradition of ‘organizational democracy’. The two studies are based on long-term fieldwork in both organizational settings, including several years of participant observation.

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‘Super-diversity’ has gained popularity in the field of sociolinguistics as a new concept that jettisons the rather rigid toolkit of speech communities, ethnolects and mother tongues in favour of notions of truncated repertoires and resources that better capture the plurality of styles, registers and genres of people living in a globalized world. In this article we take stock of the (foregoing) literature on super-diversity (a ‘sociolinguistics of mobility’), pit it against a ‘sociolinguistics of distribution’, but then only to call for a rapprochement. We claim that studies on super-diversity have a ‘big city bias’ as they remain silent on (semi-)marginal places, in our case the Dutch countryside. Sociodialectologists have produced interesting data that show a distribution of regiolects (levelled dialects) in Europe, a development that holds connection to the very same processes of globalization. In an analysis of our language material gathered at four high schools in North Brabant, the Netherlands, we seek to bring together the literature on super-diversity and the literature on dialects and regionalization.

This article offers a critical take on the excessive use of psychological applications in the work sphere, that is, management techniques that open up the psyche of the individual employee to interceptions, evaluations, and manipulations by superiors. It builds upon existing work on the psychologization of labor under the aegis of human resource apparatuses and contributes to it by centralizing the role that confessions have in this process. The article details the careers of Fehim and Halil, both Turkish-Dutch officers working for a Dutch police agency.The field data, which have been obtained through an ethnographic fieldwork between 2008 and 2013, offer an insight into how psychological applications (such as personal development plans, "fireplace sessions," empowerment courses, personality surveys, etc.) affect labor relations. The analysis opens up pathways for a better understanding of ethnic inequality in the workplace.