Psycho-Technicians and Greedy Institutions

Chapter 4 focuses on police discrimination and ethnic boundaries within the police organization. A number of ethnographic cases are discussed that help to understand how biocracy—the inclusion of the whole person in the workplace—works as a holistic type of power that makes it almost impossible for officers with a migration background to combat discrimination. More specifically, the chapter approaches diversity management, personal development plans, and other psychological instruments as forms of ‘identity control’ that stretch the outer bounds of labour control. Linguistic anthropological methods are used to study how psychological discourses traverse the Dutch police and undergo metamorphosis when they move from production to consumption sites.