This open-endedness has lead to reliance upon methodological rather than

theoretical definitions of social structure as a resource. The lacuna in the theoretical

exposition of social capital is at the heart of two important critiques of social capital
theory that have yet to be resolved. First, the measurements of ties, as both the
description and explanation, ruthlessly abstracts the formal or objective dimensions
of social relations from their cultural and intersubjective contexts (Emirbayer and
Goodwin, 1994, p.1427).34 That is, the reification of the observed ties as a thing in-itself
rather than as an emergent property of more complex social processes. This reification is
driven primarily to the methodological bias studies of social capital, to mistake the unit of
measurement for the social process itself.
Second, the problem of endogeneous causal explanation where the estimated
effect of social capital simply reflects the selection effects based on the myriad of
nonrandom ways in which people become friends. (Mouw, 2006, p.80) More
specifically, If individuals choose friends who are similar to them, then one may
reasonably suspect that the effects of many social capital variables are overestimated
because of unobserved, individual-level factors that are correlated with friendship choice
and the outcome variable of interest. (2006, p.99) This is the proverbial cat chasing its

Indeed, it is precisely because the notion of a tie is reified that the issue of
endogeneity arises because the tie is separated out from the social process from which
it emerges. This is evident in Smith (2005) who excludes the process of the formation of
ties from her model of social capital activation. As a result, the possibility that
individuals strategize to form ties with those most likely to help them get a job is
excluded from the analysis. This is because a tie is considered to be a fixed resource
that acts in the social process incidentally to the interests or strategies of those involved.
It may well also be that status is implied in who can form ties with those making it
endogeneous to the explanation of which includes status as the mechanism that is used to
explain tie activation. This paradox is not intrinsic to the overall aims of social capital
but rather the epistemological preliminaries that presuppose variable specification.
Desmonds (2012) ethnographic account of disposable ties among the urban
poor brings together the agentic, cultural, and material elements of social capital into an
account of tie formation and use. Examining the case of finding a lodging through
finding roommates when undergoing eviction, he finds that often chance interactions
between strangers at a bus stop or street corner can form the basis of highly useful if
fleeting social ties. The pressure of needing to find new lodgings quickly, the small pool
of potential roommates, and the strategic use of gift-giving and exchange, create a
context where such intense, disposable ties are possible. While this is an insightful
recruitment of the ideas of Malinowski (1922) and Mauss (1954 [1925]) to understand