Goodall, H.L., Casing a Promised Land, Expanded Edition: The Autobiography of an Organizational Detective as Cultural Ethnographer: Professor H. L. Goodall
The Consultant as Organizational Detective” offers the sobering message that real-life mysteries may surprise even the most accomplished sleuth. A concluding chapter, “Notes on Method,” and a new autobiographical afterword round out Goodall’s penetrating look at our symbol-making culture.
Philip Marlowe: Private Ethnographer : CASING A PROMISED LAND The Autobiography of an Organizational Detective as Cultural Ethnographer by H. L. Goodall Jr
http://articles.latimes.com/1990-01-07/books/bk-276_1_case-studies
It’s been a long day. All you want is a quick shot, a slow beer, and a good book. And a blonde. Or brunette. With long legs. Instead, there’s no booze because you’ve just remembered that you’re on the wagon, and the blonde is your wife, which is OK because she has long legs. As for the book, you look at the title, “Casing a Promised Land,” and ask yourself, “What is this bozo up to?” The words organizational and ethnographer catch your attention. You think about all the organizations you’ve worked for, their little enclaves and in-groups, their published rule books and their hidden agendas, their sanctions and statuses and roles, and you know you’re in for the duration.
Only the first study is written in a way resembling detective fiction, and it’s an appropriate way to begin because it situates H. L. Goodall at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the reader in a complex community that includes the Star Wars (SDI) command, the NASA Space Camp, sundry organizations that sprang up, like sharks at a feeding frenzy, around the space agency hub, shopping malls, etc. What’s important about this way of beginning is that it involves us at a subliminal level in a subculture that bears resemblances to the several in which Americans increasingly find themselves these days, especially in “the burbs.”
Rhetoric of Detective 