It has become commonplace to regard the high-tech and creative industries as part of a new cosmopolitan wave in which difference is not just tolerated but welcomed, and many have argued that diversity is at the foundation of its success (Saxenian, 1999).

However, one study takes the archetypical post-ethnic world of the software industry in west coast US (Reitman, 2006) and holds it up to scrutiny. Meredith Retman argues that the vaunted multiculturalism of these ‘creative class’ businesses is based upon the laid back and very liberal, but nevertheless unyielding, assumption that the accepted codes of behaviour and cultural values for all the black, brown, yellow and white colleagues will be those of the boys who have been brought up in all white schools and who live in all white neighbourhoods. She argues that claims of ‘colour-blindness’ in such workplaces are based upon the ‘whitewashing’ out of racial politics of inequality leaving behind a shallow and exotic multiculturalism of food or music.