I have always been impressed by those academics who can sit impassively through a complex lecture by some visiting luminary without finding it necessary to make a single note, even a furtive one on the back of an envelope. They’d lose face, no doubt, if they were seen copying it all down, like a first-year undergraduate.

Let’s consider a fairly random example of one of these generalistaccounts, Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order: FromPrehuman Times to the French Revolution (2011). Here isFukuyama on what he feels can be taken as received wisdom aboutearly human societies: ‘In its early stages human politicalorganization is similar to the band-level society observed in higherprimates like chimpanzees,’ which Fukuyama suggests can beregarded as ‘a default form of social organization’.

Our empirical example also highlighted the value of achieving virtual temporal symmetry for members of a geographically dispersed community. As electronic me­dia become increasingly central to organizational life, in­dividuals may use asynchronous media in various ways to shape devices of virtual symmetry that help them co­ordinate across geographical distance and across multiple temporal structures. This suggests that when studying the use of electronic media, researchers should pay attention to the conditions in which virtual temporal symmetry may be enacted to coordinate distributed activities, and with what consequences. Interesting questions for empirical research include the following. As work groups in orga­nizations become more geographically dispersed and/or more dependent on electronic media, do members enact virtual temporal symmetry for certain purposes? If so, for which types of purposes? And how? If not, how do such work groups achieve temporal coordination?