Casing a promised land: the autobiography of an organizational detective as cultural ethnographer

454 Pages·1994·1.05 MB·English

by  H. Lloyd Goodall

Casing a Promised Land : The
title: Autobiography of an Organizational
Detective As Cultural Ethnographer
author: Goodall, H. Lloyd.
publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
isbn10 | asin:
print isbn13: 9780809319428
ebook isbn13: 9780585131306
language: English
Organizational behavior, Corporate culture,
subject Communication in organizations,
Ethnology--Field work.
publication date: 1994
lcc: HD58.7.G656 1994eb
ddc: 302.3/5
Organizational behavior, Corporate culture,
subject:
Communication in organizations,
Ethnology--Field work.
Page iii
Casing a Promised Land
The Autobiography of an Organizational Detective as
Cultural Ethnographer
Expanded Edition
H. L. Goodall, Jr.
Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale and Edwardsville
Page iv
Copyright © 1994 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Edited by Dan Gunter
Designed by David Ford
Production supervised by Natalia Nadraga
The portion of Harper's Index appearing in chapter 3, copyright © 1988 by
Harper's Index. All rights reserved. Reprinted by special permission.
Grateful acknowledgment is extended to The Southern Communication
Journal for permission to reprint material drawn from my essay "On
Becoming an Organizational Detective" (55 {1989}: 4254), which appears
here as chapter 7.
97 96 95 94 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goodall, H. Lloyd.
Casing a promised land: the autobiography of an organizational detective as
cultural ethnographer / H. L. Goodall, Jr. Expanded ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Organizational behavior. 2. Corporate culture.
3. Communication in organizations. 4. Ethnology Field work.
I. Title.
HD58.7.G656 1994 93-50654
302.3'5dc20 CIP
ISBN 0-8093-1942-X (pbk.)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481984.

Page v
For San and Nic
Page vi
We in cities rightly grow shrewd at appraising man-made
institutionsbut beyond these tiny concentration points of rhetoric and
traffic, there lies the eternally unsolvable Enigma, the preposterous
fact that both existence and nothingness are equally unthinkable. Our
speculations may run the whole qualitative gamut, from play, through
reverence, even to an occasional shiver of cold metaphysical dreadfor
always the Eternal Enigma is there, right on the edges of our
metropolitan bickerings, stretching outward to interstellar infinity and
inward to the depths of the mind. And in this staggering disproportion
between man and no-man, there is no place for purely human boasts
of grandeur, or for forgetting that men build their cultures by huddling
together, nervously loquacious, at the edge of an abyss.
Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Charge
Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of "construct a
reading of") a manuscriptforeign, faded, full of ellipses,
incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious
commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but
in transient examples of shaped behavior.
Clifford Geertz, The International of Cultures
Page vii
Contents
What I Do and Why I Do It: Reading Myself into the ix
Stories of Others
1 1
Becoming an Organizational Detective
2 16
Notes on a Cultural Evolution: The Remaking of a
Software Company
3 40
The Way the World Ends: Inside Star Wars
4 53
Lost in Space: The Layers of Illusion Called Adult Space
Camp
5 93
Articles of Faith
6 118
How I Spent My Summer Vacation
7 133
The Consultant as Organizational Detective
8 147
Notes on Method
Afterword: "Surrendering to the Mystery," or The Sooner 169
You Arrive, the Further You Have to Go
Influences 189

Page ix
What I Do and Why I Do It: Reading Myself Into the
Stories of Others
Neither the scientific illusion of reality nor the religious reality of illusion is
congruent with the reality of fantasy in the fantasy reality of the postmodern
world. Postmodern ethnography captures this mood of the postmodern world,
for it too does not move toward abstraction, away from life, but back to
experience.
Stephen A. Tyler, The Unspeakable
Because you have to be honest. You are packed with your past and there is no
future.
Barry Hannah, Hey Jack!
Casing a Promised Land is about what happens when an ordinary
scholar of organizational communication decides to get out of the
office and confront a crisis of interpretation.
It is about what happens when he applies the postmodern interpretive
stance he has advanced in lectures, and defended with colleagues, to
the local community where working people manage to survive well
enough without him (and will undoubtedly continue to do so). And it
is about what he finds there as a result of doing just that.
While this statement of motive is true, it may make it seem as if I'd
never been out in the community before or at least had never
conducted field research in these local settings. That is not true. I have
been pursuing this approach for eight years, and the results of my
investigations have consistently appeared in print, conforming to the
conservative standards of traditional scholarly article, text, and trade
book writing. This time there is a difference. Previously I had not
ventured out with my mind set to turning directly into that cognitive
intersection where two problems of postmodern organizational study