Judges' Comments and Results

Debate 3:  TBD vs Awesomely Inefficient

Affirmative Constructive:  Well-structured and well-written. Starts right in by defining terms, then immediately lists the three main points you intend to make, and do.   Well-chosen examples and good use of sources, a mix of ones I suggested and your own. I won’t bother to comment on the many good arguments you made, but your discussion of technology, social media, and the Egyptian resistance was an excellent, well-balanced account that argued strongly and not in the typical hyped-up fashion we often see. And it made the key distinction between social media and social networks. The only problem we found was with the UAW example.  Unions are all about hierarchy.  Is the Facebook presence changing the union's internal power relationships, or is it just a way to let the rank-and-file blow off steam?

Negative Constructive:  Someone on your team has either debated at Oxford or elsewhere where the Oxford rules are in place (“the Government”) At the beginning, you say the opposition should limit itself to the more “narrow definitions of social networks,” yet you don’t say what these are. Your arguments would have been a lot stronger if you had provided some detail here. Yes, there is an explosion of FB use and texting right now, but more and more organizations (the smarter ones one might argue) are trying to harness this to their benefit, and the 2025 horizon provides a long time to get it right, especially with a generation of users who will have grown up with it as the dominant communications source. Your citation of Centola on clusters also misrepresents him a bit, and it also leaves out the arguments from equally-competent sources on the other side. And a cluster is just as much a network, social or otherwise, as a weak-tie one. While weak ties may not “drive activism,” as you contend, there is a body of literature that would say that weak ties make it possible in the first place. 

But note that Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler, sifting through a half-century of Framingham Heart Study data, found that behavioral changes by your friends' friends' friends can affect your behavior, even if you have only a 3-step connection to them.  That is, if your 3^rd degree connection stops smoking, you are more likely to stop smoking, too.  Ditto for several other health-related behaviors.  (Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, 2009) 

Where you score some points is in your refutation of the Rob Cross argument, but it also could be argued (as Cross himself does) that is not management alone that makes business successful but well-managed networks.    After the football map you leave us with a number of good questions that your opponents need to refute, however we still are missing your definition of what SNs are.

Affirmative Rebuttal:  Quite rightly, this starts with a refined definition of SNs, and organizations as groups of collaborative networks.  This sets up their lengthy rebuttal quite well.  Aside from the small quibble here and there, this is an excellent exposition of the art of rebuttal.

On the opposition's argument that dense social networks create too much information flow: They are perhaps referring to the observation by Herb Simon that an excess of one commodity can create a dearth of another.  Simon had in mind this: an excess of information creates a shortage of attention.  Your response to this charge undermines the lengthy discussion in their negative constructive.  If you had 48 hours per day, you could read the whole NYT & WSJ & Washington Post, or you could check out which articles your friends have linked to on Facebook.  It seems like you've done that on occasion…

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Negative Rebuttal:  Why limit it to social movements just because your opponents do?  It’s a valid, but limiting tactic.  Others debated the relative success of Egypt vs Iran, but it is arguable that in Iran’s much more closed society, the opposition had much further to go.  And most of the Twitter users were outside the country (as they were in Egypt.) Hard to argue that it was only click-button activism. And the use of Barnard to discuss incentives for the OWS members argues more into the hands of the pro-SN team, as incentives (and motivation) are often best communicated through informal social networks (see my Unwritten Rules of the Game paper.”

The final rebuttal seems to go back a few steps, with its insistence on the primacy of effective leadership & individual talent, without taking into account teamwork.  At least some recognition of the value of communications and social networks in an organization would make sense at this point in the debate.  Pfeffer & Veiga are right to consider people as assets, but people are also people.  And humans are a social animal.  No employee is an unlinked node.  (OK, it's not as poetic as "No man is an island," but you get the point.)

The Result:  The pros start with a well supported affirmative constructive.  The contras make a spirited challenge, but the pros' rebuttal is, again, well argued.  The final rebuttal by the contras is not as strong as their initial opposition constructive.  The pros take it.