This dissertation examines the history of VaBocha experiences with Christianity. Historians have long assumed that Christian conversion was a static product. I show that conversion was an ongoing fluid process that churchgoers negotiated, contested, and appropriated to suit the Bocha social fabric. I demonstrate how existing social facts and sites of socialization shaped VaBocha understanding of Christianity. In doing so, I focus on the daily social practices to reveal how VaBocha reconciled the idioms of Christianity with their indigenous lifeways. VaBocha made use of existing sites of socialization to make Christianity useful to their everyday life. These sites were social spaces were VaBocha articulated familial and kinship relations and learned the values, behavior, and skills fitting to Bocha society. By probing the relations occurring at the familial and communal level, the dissertation illustrates that the domestication of Christianity started in familial domestic spaces. In the dissertation, I discuss the nuanced relationships that occurred between churchgoers and family members who were not churchgoers. The fact that Christianity never established hegemony over existing social facts and the ways of socialization which reproduced them meant that VaBocha churchgoers had to devise ways to balance the demands of Christianity against familial and communal obligations. I show why churchgoers became eclectic Christians who participated in both church and indigenous activities and beliefs, despite the fact that the churches condemned most of these indigenous practices. The dissertation shows that the pre-Christian ethics of tolerance of diversity allowed for Christian and indigenous practices to co-exist harmoniously.

As conceived by Durkheim, social facts set parameters on what is of sociological interest, and subsequently how social phenomena are explained. This thesis reworks this theoretical concept to allow for biological explanations of some social phenomena. It by no means, asserts that all social phenomena can be explained by biology, but it recognizes that biological explanations of human behavior are available and are of sociological interest. The argument agrees with the main thrust of Durkheim's defense of social facts, but his critique of utility, while insightful, is considered unnecessary to negate individual causality.

In this case study, the author explores the nonprofit mission statement as a genre, its place within a genre ecology, and its communication through various genres. Theorizing the mission statement as a controlling and stabilizing force in a genre ecology, the author notes the potential of the mission statement to enact the genre function, "the authority a genre has even in the absence of its author. Noting the limitations of current genre ecology modeling (GEM), the author maps the genres, documents, and activities of a small community foundation using a revised form of GEM that more purposefully includes speech genres to map relationships; in this case study, the speech genres revealed how the mission statement is mediated through genres and activities. Further, observations and interviews revealed ideological conflicts of the organization's key stakeholders that resulted in clashes between key stakeholder values and the language of the nonprofit's mission (and other genres). Additionally, ideological consensus resulted in the addition of new organizational activities and genres, even though these activities are not in line with the language of the mission statement as written. Eventually, these activities become social facts, "ideas that the key stakeholders believe are in line with the mission when they are, in fact, in conflict with it. If these social facts are not re-aligned with the mission statement, new activities and genres are created and mediated by speech genres, potentially moving the organization further away from its purpose and goals. The author ultimately suggests a cycle of genre and activity production that will realign the social facts and the mission statement and encourage organizational leaders to return to the mission statement and change the language to reflect the organization's new reality. / Ph. D. / In this case study, the author explores how the nonprofit mission statement controls (or fails to control) a nonprofit organization’s production of activities and documents. Using a process called “genre ecology modeling” to map the genres, documents, and activities of a small community foundation, the author illustrates the relationship between the mission statement, the activities of the organization, and the various documents created to communicate the mission to external audiences. The author finds that in the organization being studied, ideological conflicts of the organization’s key stakeholders resulted in clashes between key stakeholder values and the language of the nonprofit’s mission. Additionally, ideological consensus resulted in the addition of new organizational activities as well as communications to support those activities—even though these activities are not in line with the language of the mission statement as written. Eventually, organizational leaders began to regard these activities as “social facts”—socially-accepted concepts of what the organization does that the key stakeholders believe are in line with the mission when they are, in fact, in conflict with it. If these social facts are not re-aligned with the mission statement, organizational leaders develop new activities and communications to support the socially-accepted view the organization’s purpose, as opposed to the stated mission; this pattern can potentially move the organization further away from its stated purpose and goals. The author suggests a process that will help organizational leaders engage in regular mission realignment to avoid mission drift and ensure that the language of the mission statement reflects the organization’s new reality.

In this essay I attempt to show that both the weak interpretation and the strong interpretation of what John Searle calls the principle of self–referentiality for social phenomena should be abandoned. This, I argue, is because they give rise to what I, following Burman (2023), call ”location problems” for opaque social phenomena and for social wholes, as well as a faulty understanding of social power. Instead, I propose that we understand social phenomena as constitued by social practices, in turn constituted by individuals who have the know–how necessary to participate in the social practices (in the sense that they are reliably able to do so), while not necessarily knowing that they are participating in them. In doing this, I draw on Robert B. Brandom’s notion of a social practice from Making it Explicit (1994).