We reject our opponent's assertion that social networks currently are the primary drivers of organizational success, and further will demonstrate through our refutation of our opponent's previous points that social networks will not be the main drivers of organizational success by 2025. We note here that since our opponent's rebuttal was limited exclusively to examples of the social movement variety, with no discussion of other types of "organizations" per our opponent's definition, we will likewise limit our rebuttal to the social movement sphere.
First, our opponent points to the Arab Spring movement and the Occupy Wall Street protests to argue that the mere presence of a network will create success, thereby rejecting our assertion that the use of social networks in organized social movements discourages full-fledged participation and merely encourages "click-button" activism. However, it goes without saying that the Occupy Wall Street protests have yet to demonstrate any measurable success. As for our opponent's reliance on the Arab Spring movement, we argue that it does not prove conclusively that social networks are always the drivers of success in such movements. Our opponent points to our reliance on the Malcolm Gladwell article and rightly observes that it was written before the Arab Spring. What our opponent fails to recognize or address, however, is that the Gladwell article was written well after the 2009 Iran Green Movement, which shared many similarities with the Arab Spring and yet failed. First, it was a popular-level, bottoms-up, grassroots movement that intended to engage people physically; second, it sought to effect political change at the highest levels of government; and third, it relied both on traditional social networks and on technological social media tools like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to organize, coordinate and record events.
However, where the Arab Spring succeeded, the Green Movement failed, as its primary objective in effecting regime change in Iran was not realized. Furthermore, the number of supporters in Iran who attended the February 11, 2009 protests (a national day of significance in Iran) in the streets of Tehran was only a fraction of the number of supporters who expressed their solidarity online. These facts reinforce our initial argument that social networks as a tool merely facilitate "click-button" activism, rather than encourage individuals to join worthy causes in person.
Second, while our opponent claims that social networks are the primary drivers behind organizational success, we reassert that those social networks are merely tools, or at best tangential drivers, that would be ineffective and even counterproductive without the more fundamental drivers of success, which are, as previously stated, effective leadership and individual talent. By way of evidence, a 1999 article by Pfeffer and Veiga in the Academy of Management Executive explains that an organization's success is directly driven by "management practices that treat people as assets."
To illustrate these claims, we return to the Green Movement protests discussed above, along with the Occupy Wall Street protests, which now have gone global. These movements demonstrate that it is in fact effective leadership in organizations and the use by leaders of social networks -- not the presence of social networks themselves -- that drive success. On the causes of failure of the Green Movement, a Telegraph article from June 2010 observes that, despite the most sincere intentions of those who participated in the movement, its leaders "never had any real intention of campaigning for the kind of changes those who took to the streets last year were demanding."
Additionally, as the current Occupy Wall Street protests in all of its global manifestations have demonstrated, poor leadership and an ill-defined mission statement have prevented the creation of a coordinated global solidarity movement. Instead, the movement overall has disintegrated into riots and violence around the globe with no cohesive strategy -- the most vivid example of which is in Italy.
Lastly, in addition to the two main drivers stated above, adequate incentives to induce cooperation form an additional main driver of organizational success. Chester I. Barnard argues in The Economy of Incentives (published in Shafritz's Classics of Organizational Theory) that "the individual is always the basic strategic factor within an organization," and that a driver of inducing individual cooperation (and thereby organizational success) is the ability of leadership/management to effectively provide inducements for cooperation. Barnard goes on to state that "in all sorts of organizations the affording of adequate incentives becomes the most definitely emphasized task in their existence" -- that is, adequate incentives and the leadership’s ability to identify and provide them are the main drivers of any organization's success. While at this point in time we cannot say with certainty what will become of the Occupy Wall Street protests, the parallels to date between that movement and the Iran Green Movement indicate that like the Green Movement, which failed to incentivize the support base, the Occupy protests may go the same way. Ultimately, it is not the existence of traditional and technological social networks in these examples that determines success or failure, but rather the use by leadership of these networks to mobilize, incentivize, organize and coordinate network members into action.
In sum, social networks without proper leadership, objectives/goals and effective means of encouraging actual participation become largely worthless in and of themselves. They are shown to be tools that are effective only when married to the primary drivers of organizational success.
FATALITY
No comments:
Post a Comment