On the one hand, contemporary corporations want people who are geographically, culturally and temporally remote to work together to generate new knowledge and accomplish routine work--they want to generate multi-disciplinary, globally dispersed communities of practice. On the other hand, they need to exert some control over this divergent, dispersed, innovative and creative workforce. Here I explore the role that workplace education plays in mediating individual and group autonomy, and central control, in global networks of interaction. I consider the ways that three workplace educators (working in government training institutions, commercial organisations, in-house human resource departments and unions) intervene in work practice at local (but not necessarily geographically local) worksites in unexamined ways. I argue that their stories offer us insights into the ways workplace educators help create new (face-to-face and virtual) learning communities, certainly, but they also help to exert centralised corporate control over work practice, work relationships and work identities, in unobtrusive ways.