Casing a Promised Land: The Autobiography of an Organizational Detective as Cultural Ethnographer

Casing the Promised Land by H.L. Goodall, Jr. (the first in an ethnographic trilogy) is an interpretive ethnography that consists of a collection of stories over the course of eight years (and written up in two) that seeks to construct a perspective (not to be confused with Truth) in a larger effort to encourage discussion and debate (particularly) among academics who usually have clear ideas about what `science' is or should be (e.g. this debate is especially apparent among the quantitative/qualitative divide). This collection of essays frames ethnographic organizational `mysteries' focusing on communication scholarship within the context of personal experience as researcher. Goodall weaves together a strand of multiple narratives as researcher and ethnographer, husband, professor, etc., that collectively constitute an `experience,' albeit an experience that in its totality can never actually be fully understood or even known (which is precisely the point). The experiences chronicled in this text spotlight the poetics of humans communicating but also highlight the space outside where meaningful communication takes place that cannot necessarily be accounted for. Here Goodall, an authority on rhetoric and communication, seeks to complicate our thinking about organizational communication and technology especially in the rural South as well as make a case for the importance of interpretive ethnography in the academy. Goodall makes no qualms about his general dissatisfaction with the social sciences and much to his credit this book highlights through storytelling the great necessity for ethnographic research as well as noting the limitations and shortcomings that often result, a point few positivists are willing to concede. It is within this space that we can learn to be better researchers, writers, intellectuals and human beings so to test the general shortcomings of growth and creativity that we all no doubt experience. Stated otherwise, we as academics are not nor should be confined by the limits of a particular research design or methodology that all too often seems to thwart our creativity (although not our promotion to tenure) in so many ways. This text provides the researcher with yet another way of doing research differently outside of the constraints of the establishment. This book was very entertaining and highly recommended for both the novice and the seasoned researcher.