The psalmist laments: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.” As has become clear throughout this book, Telecorp's right hand did not know what the left hand was doing. Yet neither hand lost its cunning: Telecorp was a successful company with generally satisfied customers and employees. How? How did this organization bear up, even thrive, despite the multiple disruptions, the lack of guarded borders, the influx and fluxing of genres and social languages, the lack of modularity in work, the turnover, and the spotty support for training and learning?

Or to put it differently: What do we do about net work? What must we learn – or not forget – if the right hand is to remember its cunning? How do we go about examining, investigating, theorizing – and organizing, supporting, managing, and coordinating – such work? How do we retain the dynamism, cultivate the necessary interconnections, and put together a vocabulary to describe it while introducing the stability necessary for people to thrive in their net work?

Let's return to the dialogue we've had throughout the book, the one between activity theory and actor–network theory – or if you prefer, between dialectics and rhizomatics, weaving and splicing, development and alliance, modernism and amodernism. Because that's what this study and this book boil down to – how to retain and extend the insights of each as we continue to deal with rapidly changing work organization.