The Insignificance of Weak Social Ties and the Uselessness of Strong Ones (With Two Case Histories of Low-income Families in Naples)

The attention of the social scientific community in the last two decades has been increasingly drawn towards the concept of social capital. Nevertheless, in spite of the large amount of theoretical work on the subject, there is still no real agreement about the scope and the implications of the concept, which need to be known when measuring its frequency. Indeed, sometimes it seems almost that its very existence requires an act of faith rather than a strict empirical verification.