In order to examine the social process of social capital activation the component

parts of a tie - or for the purposes of this study, a relationship - must be

disaggregated. Burt (2005, p.12) observes a distinction that provides the basis for solving
this dilemma: there is a network residue to social history, a network in which individuals
are variably connected as a function of prior contact, exchange and attendant emotions.
This distinction between a network and social history is a fundamental one, but
remains undertheorized by Burt, who takes the social history as a direct predictor of the
network in his research methodology and thus subsumes the distinction in his research.
Instead, these two elements should be kept separate as two dialectic elements.35 There is
an objective, history of intersubjective social exchange between individuals, and then
there is the subjective interpretation of the social meaning of the exchange, the residue
that construes the social exchange as a relationship. These perceptions are socially
constructed within the social milieu through normative definitions of what constitutes
different kinds of relationships, when they can be initiated, what the appropriate terms
are of the social exchange, when they should be broken off. They exist in a dialectical
relationship: as the normative perceptions of relationships structure the possibilities for
exchanges, and different exchanges structure the possibilities for their interpretation.
This was indeed Mausss (1954 [1925]) insight: that more important than the actual

Current measures of social capital refer to different parts of this process. Explicit
labeling is measuring the subjective interpretations of a whole history of social exchanges
from one of the exchange-parties point of view. Shared memberships of affiliations
refer to the material basis of exchange, the positions in the social structure that open
individuals up to potential exchange partners. Rates of interpersonal communication
measures the frequency of social exchanges but does not address the normative
framework in which those exchanges take place. It is therefore no surprise that issues of
endogeneity arise when variables are hypothesized to interact with elements intrinsic to
the social process by which ties emerge. Culture and agency are not external variables
that interact with ties, they are intrinsic to the social process of ties through the agentic
strategies that underpin the basis of exchange and interpretation.
Social capital activation as a social process is hypothesized to be characterized by
three interactions of the component parts and the participants of the exchange. First, is
the asymmetry of interpretation of the basis of the social exchange between the
participating partners. Each of the exchange partners may understand the transaction
differently and ascribe different symbolic and emotional meanings to it