This open-endedness has lead to reliance upon methodological rather thantheoretical definitions of social structure as a resource. The lacuna in the theoreticalexposition of social capital is at the heart of two important critiques of social capitaltheory that have yet to be resolved. First, the measurements of “ties”, as both thedescription and explanation, “‘ruthlessly abstracts’ the formal or ‘objective’ dimensionsof social relations from their cultural and intersubjective contexts” (Emirbayer andGoodwin, 1994, p.1427).34 That is, the reification of the observed ties as a thing in-itselfrather than as an emergent property of more complex social processes. This reification isdriven primarily to the methodological bias studies of social capital, to mistake the unit ofmeasurement for the social process itself.Second, the problem of endogeneous causal explanation where “the estimatedeffect of social capital simply reflects the selection effects based on the myriad ofnonrandom ways in which people become friends.” (Mouw, 2006, p.80) Morespecifically, “If individuals choose friends who are similar to them, then one mayreasonably suspect that the effects of many social capital variables are overestimatedbecause of unobserved, individual-level factors that are correlated with friendship choiceand 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 ofendogeneity arises because the “tie” is separated out from the social process from whichit emerges. This is evident in Smith (2005) who excludes the process of the formation ofties from her model of social capital activation. As a result, the possibility thatindividuals strategize to form ties with those most likely to help them get a job isexcluded from the analysis. This is because a ‘tie’ is considered to be a fixed resourcethat ‘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 itendogeneous to the explanation of which includes status as the mechanism that is used toexplain tie activation. This paradox is not intrinsic to the overall aims of social capitalbut rather the epistemological preliminaries that presuppose variable specification.Desmond’s (2012) ethnographic account of “disposable ties” among the urbanpoor brings together the agentic, cultural, and material elements of social capital into anaccount of tie formation and use. Examining the case of finding a lodging throughfinding roommates when undergoing eviction, he finds that often chance interactionsbetween strangers at a bus stop or street corner can form the basis of highly useful iffleeting social ties. The pressure of needing to find new lodgings quickly, the small poolof potential roommates, and the strategic use of gift-giving and exchange, create acontext where such intense, disposable ties are possible. While this is an insightfulrecruitment of the ideas of Malinowski (1922) and Mauss (1954 [1925]) to understand