Judges' Comments and Results

Debate 2: +++ vs. Woot:

Affirmative Constructive:  You start well by defining terms, then wander a bit in definition of “success,” although you get back on track with three well-argued examples of success.  You lay down the basis for arguing that technologies support this with their rapid expansion and uptake. It goes off the rails somewhere in the Drezner/Collins area, but recovers nicely with the Cross/Thomas reference.    Especially like point at end, that success is not always for a “moral or noble objective.”  You might have referenced the creator of this argument, who is none other than Max Weber (ethical vs. instrumental rationality.)  Making “success” an absolute value potentially weakens any argument the other side might have about the “bad guys” winning.  In sum: lots of points made, but more of a shotgun than a rifle.  More examples than sources, but the sources used are OK.

Negative Constructive:  It is always tricky to start an argument with a chicken-and-egg issue like networks and organizations.  Your argument would have benefited from a deeper dive into the literature on organizations, because simply asserting that a network can be used to accomplish goals but doesn’t create them is a bit simplistic. In fact, you have to look no further than my dissertation (on Trunk) to find a reasonably complete discussion on the interdependence of nets and orgs, which, ironically, could have benefitted either side in this debate. 

You could read your intro the following way: organizations are organizations, and social networks are social networks, and only organizations are structured with the aim of achieving a specific goal.  But can't an organization have a social network in it?  Would that social network not be structured towards achieving a goal?  Also, you say social networks are composed of individuals with different priorities.  But so are organizations.

You use OWS as an example, but the HuffPo quote underscores the fact that the movement is still in its formative stages and could go either way. A look back and some historical examples might have helped you.  Solidarity, for example, seemed to have a common agenda when it formed, but it took them years to coalesce into one effective enough to bring down the Polish government.  And it was the formation of communication nets that made it so.  Ditto for “consensus unlikely to emerge.” Your point about quantification and measurement is well-taken, although it was reasonably-well rebutted subsequently. And isn’t a “small group of leaders connected by strong ties” as much of a network as a small-world, weak-link one? As for your Gladwell and Arab Spring arguments, what would have helped (and Gladwell subsequently agreed in a debate with Shirky) was to make the distinction between social media/tools as the sole indicators of success and the underlying network of people brought together in common cause, through means of communication that they felt free to use.

The comment that traditional organizational structures are necessary to reach a consensus, etc., has been addressed by Yochai Benkler in his analyses of the open source software movement and collective efforts like Wikipedia.  Your opponents could have called you on this—had they read it.

Affirmative Rebuttal:  Very effective to follow the opponent’s points in order. Perhaps your most effective points were that SNs facilitate success (see the Solidarity point above,) and that using SNA to assess the robustness of the OWS networks could help predict its eventual success or failure, allow it to reshape itself accordingly.  You provide a lot of support for Point 2 on quantification, and there are lots of studies now in the works about the links between employee engagement and SNs. Apple with its networked leadership vs. Dell the autocrat is also effective.  Although one could argue with many of the points raised, especially when some of them have only a tenuous connection to networks (as the opponents point out in their rebuttal)  the point of a debate is to present a broad array, a preponderance of directed arguments, and you do that.

Negative Rebuttal: Statements like “if social networks must make fundamental changes to become organizations” revive the chicken-and-egg issue mentioned previously. One does not necessarily become the other.  The affirmative team did a pretty good job of making this distinction; although you rightly point out that they never really did define what a social network is.  However, I think that you use of Powell’s definitions to make the distinction between market and network misses their point that even smaller companies acting together in networks can achieve success in the marketplace. It’s not a one-or-the-other issue.  Other points: your Apple counter-argument would have been more effective if you had (if you could) address the post-Jobs share price issue. Steve Jobs was certainly essential to Apple's success, but perhaps so too were the social networks at Apple linking hardware engineers and industrial designers.  To say (correctly) that Jobs was critical does not exclude the possibility that social networks played a major role, too. 

And I’m not sure that the opposition stated that the only strong network was a highly-interconnected (or dense) one.  You saved the most relevant  of your arguments for last, which is that your opponents failed to support the “main” driver contention. The only thing you might have done is to support that with a bit of speculation on the future, perhaps talking about technology.

The Result:   The Pro team on the whole made stronger arguments, although the Con team’s point about them not having clearly made the “main driver” argument about SNs is valid.  However, debates are relative, not absolute, and the Con team did not make as strong or clear a set of arguments against the resolution as the Pro team did for it. Also, the Pro team, by recognizing the interconnection between organizations and networks and by pointing out that success can be positive or negative, took the wind out of much of the Con team’s arguments.  So the edge goes to the Pros.