The author's argument revolves around the relationships between government agendas and the agency of teachers, and between them the intermediary role of management as "system leaders" of network forms. Network is a pluralistic concept: networks can serve very different educational-political interests. They offer the potential of new participatory relationships among teachers across schools, but also the potential of simply being vehicles for the transmission and implementation of government agendas. The role of system leaders is clearly pivotal, but again it is ambivalent. Will they be rooted in and primarily responsible to grassroots initiatives or will their role be to manage them on behalf of government, creating themselves in the process as a new super-managerial elite? His own view is that networks and system leadership can best be understood as a reconfiguring of state power, attempting to create new vehicles for the implementation of policy under the control of a reliable new technocratic management cadre. As for what it will mean in practice: whether the project of creating sufficient system leaders succeeds, and the extent to which network forms are capable of resolving the crisis of "performativity", remains to be seen. Within each network the tensions and contradictions he has described will no doubt work themselves out in different ways and, perhaps, with different outcomes.