We've seen the strategic and tactical elements of net work at Telecorp, particularly in how these allow the splicing and weaving of different activities into a network. But how are networks trained? In an organization in constant flux, with constant turnover and acquisitions, how do workers learn their jobs – particularly jobs that they themselves consider unteachable?

The problem is compounded because, as we saw in Chapter 5, Telecorp was constantly and deeply interlinked with other organizations. At any time, a worker could be collaborating with workers in other functional groups, counterparts in other telecoms, customers, service providers, and so on through a seemingly endless list. And this worker might have had to draw upon various sorts of genres and social languages from wildly different domains. It's notoriously problematic to apply one activity's tools and skills to another, so boundary work – work that potentially any worker at Telecorp could be called upon to perform, since everyone was on the border – tended to involve learning different sets of genres and social languages. That is, workers had to keep a foot in each activity, becoming “dividuals” (Deleuze, 1995), workers who were continually – pick your term here: deskilled (Haraway, 1991), reskilled (Castells, 1996), or engaging in lifelong learning (Zuboff & Maxmin, 2004). Learning had become discontinuous and spread across multiple activities and domains (see Drucker, 2003; cf. Johnson-Eilola, 2005). At Telecorp, this learning was rarely done in a coherent, consistent way.