In this paper, a social and critical perspective on mathematics education is operationalized through the concepts of habitus, field, and foreground. As part of an on-going project, we have made a tentative analysis of how reliance on colours in the field of workplaces can be seen as signs of mathematical aspects of a person’s workplace competence. The analysis of this initial qualitative case study, suggests that making this kind of hidden mathematics explicit, contributes to an understanding of what mathematics may "become" in work. Our assumption is that this point of departure, in the long run, can contribute to a deeper understanding of mathematics’ function in workplaces, in society, and in school.